Before Orientalism: Asian Peoples and Cultures in European Travel Writing, 1245–1510 by Kim M. Phillips

Abstract

Before Orientalism: Asian Peoples and Cultures in European Travel Writing, 1245-1510, by Kim M. Phillips. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. viii, 314 pp. $79.95 US (cloth). In this book, Kim M. Phillips creates cultural history that seeks to redefine current understandings of transnational encounter through close study of travel in late medieval period. She limits her examination to areas now known as Mongolia, China, and Southeast Asia. Phillips' argument centres on ways in which European travel to these of world during late medieval period differed from travel to the Holy Land and surrounding regions (1). As result, her contribution to field is to move scholarship beyond over-simplification of encounters between monolithic east and west that seem in perpetual conflict with one another toward more vibrant discussion about nuances of these encounters. She argues that, rather than imperial endeavours, desire for information and for pleasure were two chief impulses guiding late medieval readers' interest in travel writing on Asia (2). Through her close examination of travel writings in this period, Phillips offers comprehensive study that illuminates various examples in support of her discussion. Phillips begins her study with refreshing reflection on Edward Orientalism (New York, 1978). While Phillips joins in recent criticisms of book, she also reminds her readers that Said's concept has had wide utility and application when treated as tool for interpreting certain western of subjected cultures, especially in literature and visual arts (16). Her discussion of work--a great strength in her book--notes that while medievalists have interrogated claims in context of Latin Christendom's treatment of Islamic societies, current scholarship fails to consider relationship of former to other Asian regions. If we consider this dynamic, Phillips suggests, we may see how position that existence of a distinction between an authentic geographical location and its ideological construction in western representations (16) emerges within late medieval travel writing. Stories about wonders of orient or existence of monsters seeped into travellers' consciousnesses, becoming the object(s) of European horror, pleasure, or admiration for readers of travel writing (20). Phillips works diligently throughout her text to demonstrate how these responses to existing beliefs about orient--particularly in Far East--did not result in or create imperial motives. In same chapter On Orientalism, Phillips discusses how, contrary to British explorers of eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, [m]edieval travelers and pseudo-travelers rarely lumped diverse oriental cultures together or resorted to overarching caricatures (22). She offers examples to this end throughout her book. The chapter Food and Foodways discusses how certain staples in country's cuisine depended largely on availability, as in John of Plano Carpini's assessment of infertility of Mongolian lands and subsequent absence of fruits (75). …