The fascination with medieval travelogues and their descriptions of the foreign worlds on the (imaginary) Asian continent has been one of the hallmarks of medieval scholarship over the last ten to fifteen years. The number of critical studies dealing with a plethora of individual aspects in this field of xenology is legion, but still much work remains to be done, as Muenkler's (in German spelled with an umlaut over the 'u') dissertation, submitted to the Humboldt University Berlin, Germany, in 1997/1998 and revised for the publication since then, indicates. Her particular focus does not rest on anthropological, sociological, or literary elements, and she is hardly interested in monster lore, linguistic problems, geographical information, pragmatic details of traveling, and authenticity issues (but see her discussion of Marco Polo versus John Mandeville). Instead, Muenkler examines the status and character of the travelogues within their respective discursive environment and places them within an epistemological context, following Immanuel Kant's dictum that the forms of perception constitute the observed objects. Consequently, she wants to investigate the praxis of intercultural communication, the narrative identification of the foreign world in the travelogues, and the information transfer about the foreign world in the East.
As a basis of her analysis, Muenkler differentiates three classes of knowledge, that is, categorical, instrumental, and operative. The categorical knowledge was established by European diplomats and political travelers who went to the East in order to gain information about the foreign countries and peoples. The many merchants and tradesmen simply strove for instrumental knowledge which allowed them to interact with the foreign colleagues and to cope with the market conditions in the East. Finally, the Christian missionaries attempted to acquire operative knowledge with which they could realize their goals of converting the pagan peoples and to establish the dominance of the Christian Church far beyond the borders of medieval Europe. This systematic differentiation allows Muenkler to analyze the different types of travelogues according to their purposes, intentions, and content value. Her book itself, however, is divided into three parts, the first dealing with the history of cultural contacts and their discursive description, the second analyzing paradigms of how medieval authors described the foreign world, and the third examining the relationship between the travel experience and the establishment of the subjective self.
After a historical overview of the medieval contacts (voluntary or involuntary) with the Mongols, Muenkler discusses the European efforts to gain some basic information about these people, especially by means of the diplomatic missions carried out by the Franciscans Laurentius of Portugal and John de Plano Carpini, and the Dominicans Ascelin of Cremona and Andreas of Longjumeau. Additionally, the French King Louis IX sent William of Rubruck to the Mongols in 1253. The reports delivered after their return to Europe, especially the one by John de Plano Carpini, carefully followed, as Muenkler observes, the traditional model of Aristotelian categories which facilitated a fast copying and translation process disseminating them all over Europe. In contrast to most previous travelogues which had been determined by religious purposes, these authors pursued the goal of summarizing and collecting their information assembled during the journeys, thus to give an accurate eywitness-account. Muenkler states that the travels did not condition the texts, instead, the texts ("Schrift") decided the travels, as the latter were not undertaken for their own sake, but with the intention of gaining information which was to be disseminated as texts. (49) In this sense, curiosity here assumed a new quality, as it was not seen as a negative characteristic, but rather as a necessity in order to deal with the threat coming from the East. This philosophical and moral-religious aspect, briefly mentioned at the beginning, is later reviewed again (232ff.), but there Muenkler contextualizes it considerably, refering to St. Augustine and modern philosophers such as Hans Blumenberg. Strangely, however, she does not consider the authoritative voices from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and instead mostly relies on modern scholarship. Obviously, here is an important desideratum as future research needs to address the question of how the contemporaries reacted to the travelogues, especially as these often undermined, in a radical fashion, the religious, ethical, and also the scientific paradigms. We can tell that many texts enjoyed a considerable, sometimes stupendous popularity, but this does not mean that the related news met with approval everywhere. Muenkler also examines mappaemundi as repositories of information in a later chapter (161ff.), but they were limited to a visual reflection of the world as reported about by the travelers.
Although we do not know enough about late-medieval trade between Europe and Asia, there were many contacts, and a surprisingly large number of merchants went as far east as India and China. Unfortunately, most of the letters or reports written by these merchants have not survived, but those records still available to us paint an amazing picture of a mercantile world that had quickly adapted to the new conditions in the foreign countries and knew well how to profit from the economic needs and demands at the various markets. Muenkler describes these texts as "instrumental", not defined by causality and modern rationality, but as pragmatic and factual. The letters and reports, however, were too instrumental to establish a text tradition on their own and did not find favor among the chroniclers and scholars. (65)
By contrast, the missionaries pursued knowledge about the foreign world which could be used both by the Church and the chroniclers back home. Consequently they produced operative information which was preserved in their texts, though the problems for all missionaries to cope with the various languages spoken in the Mongol empire were almost unsolvable, especially with regards to the abstract concepts characteristic of the Christian religion. Only those missionaries, however, who eventually returned home have provided us with extensive reports or a large number of letters. The others who stayed in the East for the rest of their lives soon were left out from the specific discourse back home and therefore lost contact with traditional European society. (89) The great exception was the Franciscan Odorico de Pordenone who dictated the report about his experiences to a scribe in 1330 after a stay of sixteen years in India and China. Interestingly he reflected more about his personal observations and the foreign world at large than about the religious issues of his missionary activities.
The most important case of travel report has always been Marco Polo's Il Milione which Muenkler defines not as a merchant's account, but as a collection of operative information. Through Rustichello da Pisa's contributions--the extent of which remains debatable--Polo succeeded in leaving behind the mercantile-instrumental level of discourse and to enter the level of literary and scholastic discourse (110), especially, as the author emphasizes, as all Aristotelian categories are met by the text offering answers for "ubi, quando, quantitas, qualitas, relatio, situs, habitus, actio, and passio". (112) Moreover, the international fascination which his text exerted created a dimension of discursivity on its own which left the original author far behind and allowed Il Milione to become part of a far-reaching text production which constantly added, changed, and cut the original whose popularity was, as Muenkler claims, so extensive because it appealed to various groups of readers. (122)
Next we hear of John de Mandevilles's Travels which was one of the most successful travelogues in the entire Middle Ages, although the author only collected his information from a wide range of sources, apparently without having traveled himself. Muenkler argues that the combination of a plain travel report about the Orient with a pilgrimage account represented an unusual narrative strategy (129), but a considerable number of literary texts had long before played with such a combination, see, for example, the Middle High German texts Herzog Ernst and Reinfried von Braunschweig. Nevertheless, the author rightly points out that the creative interaction between the religious (pilgrimage) and the secular (travel experiences) contributed to Mandeville's enormous popularity (the same applied to Herzog Ernst). Although the entire account was made up, the narrator always provides the reader with exact measurements which, because they seemingly authenticate the report, especially appealed to the scholarly community. (140) Even more than Polo's Il Milione, Mandeville's book was accepted by many different circles of discourse, because he and all future translators and scribes either "lied", as the author states (146), or because he appropriated the entire world for his narrative account. Muenkler argues that Polo's text cannot be "trusted" much more than Mandeville's, as both only utilized experiences, irrespective of whether it was their own or that of others, to deal with the 'foreign' as a catalyst to understand the 'self'--a position which seems difficult to defend as it owes more to a theoretical concept than to the careful analysis of the texts. Surprisingly, later she assumes the very opposite position (275) and emphasizes the quality of Polo's Il Milione's as an eye-witness account, leaving us wondering what to make out of such contrastive viewpoints. The conclusion that Mandeville transformed into a 'foreigner' who encountered his 'self' wherever he went and made the 'foreign' to something familiar (146) would require extensive elaborations and justifications which, however, Muenkler does not fully provide.
In the second part, the author examines the modes of how the foreign world was experienced by the various travelers. She observes that all the writers made serious attempts to understand the other cultures and peoples, but this never meant the establishment of familiarity or even tolerance. 'The Foreign' was to be identified in scholarly terms, but no efforts were made to remove the foreignness of the distant peoples and their world. Muenkler warns us, however, to search for simple binary models of foreign and self, as 'the foreign' was perceived beyond all traditional concepts of 'the other'. Once again, the use of literary examples would have been extremely helpful in this context, especially as the author would have been forced to avoid some of her generalizations (see my forthcoming anthology Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages. Xenological Approaches to Medieval Phenomena [New York-London: Routledge, 2002]). Then she turns to the mappaemundi and points out that people in the Middle Ages were fully aware of the ball shape of the Earth, which is also confirmed by Marco Polo and Odorico de Pordenone, which soundly refutes older and especially popular opinions about this age (see Rudolf Simek, Erde und Kosmos im Mittelalter, who had, already in 1992, deconstructed this myth). In addition, the author examines individual highlights common to many travelogues, such as Jerusalem, Mount Arafat, the alleged Paradise, the empire of Prester John, and the function of the term 'barbarian' for the infidels in East Asia (now also see Wilhelm Baum, Die Verwandlung des Mythos vom Reich des Priesterkoenigs Johannes, 1999).
In the third part Muenkler tries to gain a more advanced understanding of the correlation between experience and subjectivity as reflected in the travelogues. For this purpose she investigates the tension between facts and fiction, between Marco Polo's account and the one by Mandeville. To what extent, she wonders, can the travelogues be understood as autobiographical accounts? How much prejudice determined the reports, how many filters were used before the writers even had embarked on their journeys? Did they use topical knowledge ("Toposwissen") or objective knowledge ("Beobachtungswissen"), were they driven by church-approved curiosity or by condemnable, individual curiosity? Most interesting, but also very speculative, prove to be Muenkler's arguments that within a discursive analysis none of the subjective statements about things such as personal observations can be taken at face value, and in this sense both Polo and Mandeville are considered as parallel text producers whose individual positions do not matter for the text analysis, especially as the text tradition with its hundreds of copies and translations makes it impossible to identify, at least in Muenkler's opinion, the "original". Muenkler uses a postmodern concept of the narrative individual (Gerard Genette) which underwent many transformations and adaptations at the hands of editors, translators, and scribes.
With a strike of the metaphoric pen Muenkler throws out almost 200 years of philological research and claims that each text copy constitutes its own author as the reporting subject is identified only as a "representation". (239) Certainly, the enormous dissemination process meant that the original text by Polo and Rustichello underwent many changes, but can one indeed claim that each text version must be considered by itself, insofar as each narrative subject was different from all others? Muenkler seems not to be familiar enough with the many discussions in the field of literary scholarship pertaining to text philology, stemmatology, authenticity, and autobiography, and simply assumes that the textual variations created new author identities in each new text version because travelogues required, especially in contrast to pilgrimage reports, an author personality for authenticity's sake. Certainly, Polo's account contains many topical elements, but it is also characterized by a unique degree of realistic, especially personal observations in clear contrast to Mandeville's book with its fantastic elements, as Muenkler acknowledges herself elsewhere. (275) The latter, on the other hand, achieves its own quality by its encyclopedic dimension as practically all information was derived from previous sources, but not from personal experiences.
Muenkler finally argues that the traditional opposition of authoritative knowledge versus empirical knowledge, or topical versus observational knowledge related in the travelogues must be regarded as obsolete because they were irrelevant within the public discourse. (284) This leads her to the subsequent thesis that the world described by Mandeville was not fictional, whereas the describing subject was a creation (fictum sujectum). Despite the elegant formulation the concluding remark--Mandeville was not a liar, instead he was a fiction--does not fully make sense and leaves the reader with the impression that Muenkler intended to close her study with a brilliant thought influenced by postmodern narratology. Nevertheless, this is a false firework which mars the otherwise very impressive analysis of these late-medieval travelogues. Similarly, Muenkler also suggests that modern science established itself not by relying on the senses and physical experience but rather by profoundly distrusting them. (280) This is astonishing, to say the least, and hard to believe, as the author here suddenly abandons her critical discussion in favor of speculative theory shedding serious doubt on her ultimate interpretation of these medieval travelogues and also modern sciences.
The volume concludes with the bibliography, a register of all personal names, and six illustrations. Unfortunately, not all titles referred to in the study are included in the bibliography (see, e.g., 44, note 91; 278, note 185), and one would have liked to have a subject index as well. Overall, this is a very thought-provoking, impressively comparative investigation of how medieval Europe perceived the world of the Mongols. The functionalization of discourse analysis indeed proves to be productive for a fuller understanding of the information conveyed by the travel authors, but there are also dangerous pitfalls as Muenkler's last chapter reveals. She is certainly right in that these texts contain elements of historiography (282), but they also impress us, which is never discussed here, by their literary quality. Another aspect worthy for future investigations are the anthropological and religious dimensions as the authors deal with foreign peoples and their cultures. Although Muenkler has written her study in German, it deserves to be consulted by international scholarship focused on these travelogues and the general confrontation between medieval Europe and the world of the Mongols.