Landscape, Place, Pilgrimage, and Tourism in The Book of John Mandeville
The Book of John Mandeville is a mid-fourteenth-century work of travel writing, originally written in French, purportedly written by an English knight (the titular Sir John Mandeville himself) as a guide to the Holy Land for pilgrims. [1] The text has long been of interest to scholars, particularly due to its unusual structure: it is actually far more than a pilgrim’s guide, and much of the work sets out to describe all the lands of the East, beyond Jerusalem. Scholars have thus grappled with this peculiarity, attempting to discern just where Mandeville’s focus truly lies and why he opted for the structure he did, with some critics arguing for the primacy and centrality of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and others claiming that his focus lies eastward, in his descriptions of the rest of Asia and of Africa.
Overlooked in this discussion, however, has been a particular strategy employed by Mandeville in his description of the Holy Land. Mandeville leans more heavily on descriptions of the physical landscape when discussing Jerusalem and its surrounding environs, and these descriptions lend the Holy Land a greater sense of “place” than the other regions described in the text. This “placeness” and the feeling of “being-in-place” ascribed to the Holy Land gives it a more authentic feel than the rest of the world, and as a result, confirms Mandeville’s emphasis on the region while also revealing how Mandeville saw the world (and, thus, why he structured the book the way he did): the Holy Land is the proper destination for pilgrimage, while the rest of the world is more fit for the less auspicious purpose of tourism.
Before analyzing The Book of John Mandeville within this framework, the terms “place” and “tourism” need to be defined. Consider first the concept of place. Place, argues the influential geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, “begins as undifferentiated space,” only becoming place “as we get to know it better and endow it with value” (Tuan, Space and Place 6). Tuan is referring to a sort of hierarchy here; the universe itself consists of wholly of space, but space becomes place only when it is “endow[ed] with value.” Place is more valuable than mere space, primarily because it is ascribed more value. Edward Relph elaborates even further, writing, “Places have meaning: they are characterised by the beliefs of man.” Place is, essentially, space which is given meaning by people. Furthermore, according to Relph, place “involves an integration of elements of nature and culture . . . A place is not just the ‘where’ of something; it is the location plus everything that occupies that location seen as an integrated and meaningful phenomenon” (3). It is not merely a physical location, then. A place consists of the culture and the lived-in experience of anyone looking at it, passing through it, or living in it. It is also an “integration” of those elements and of nature—a critical point in the discussion of The Book of John Mandeville.
That last characteristic opens up the possibility that place has varying “tiers” of a sort. Consider these examples. A country like, say, India is inherently a place—it is space on the planet given meaning by people. The very fact that it possesses a name makes it a place on some level. But its sense of “placeness” also depends on its perception by an individual person. To someone who has not been to India—the average medieval European, perhaps—it is less of a place than, for example, the church down the street where the individual attends. The latter is inscribed with many more layers of meaning than the distant, foreign country. To return to The Book of John Mandeville for a moment, if an author wishes to describe a location as particularly holy and worthy of pilgrimage, she or he ought to instill in the reader a sense of that second “tier” of place, in order to highlight its importance, and Mandeville does just that in his descriptions of the Holy Land.
One aspect of place and place-making that is relevant to The Book of John Mandeville is the importance of a sense of the natural and physical landscape of a location. In imbuing a location with meaning and establishing it as the more meaningful, significant tier of place, the natural landscape must play a prominent role. This role is what Relph, quoted above, refers to when he describes place as an “integration of elements of nature and culture” (emphasis mine). The cultural activity and meaning of a location alone is not enough to make that location an intimate place (though, of course, it is enough to make it a basic, lower-tier place, like the India example given above); the perception of landscape must play a role also.
Both the archaeologist Christopher Tilley and the philosopher Edward Casey observe this prominence of landscape in place-making. Tilley writes most forcefully on the issue, going as far as to argue that the “spirit of a place may be held to reside in a landscape” (26). To Tilley, it seems, one cannot truly have place without having landscape. He does not contradict Relph’s belief in the “integration” of landscape with human culture, however. Indeed, Tilley concurs with their fundamental integration, observing that “[h]uman activities become inscribed within a landscape such that every cliff, large tree, stream, swampy area becomes a familiar place” (27). It is not as though a place-making author such as Mandeville simply describes the landscape and can be done with it—the very act of doing so brings in perception and meaning that is the result of “human activities.” This thinking is perhaps best summarized by Casey, who writes, “to be a landscape is to be a place . . . it is to be the more or less coherent setting of an embodied point of view” (Representing Landscape xv). If an author like Mandeville truly wants the audience to get the feeling of “being-in-place,” the landscape must play a role in the description of a location.
Given the nature of Mandeville’s account, which is the account of Asia and Africa from the perspective of a western European, one final question of place must be addressed: can a sense of place be established even in a travel narrative? After all, travel involves moving from one location to another. In doing so, is it even possible to obtain the sensation of “being-in-place,” at least in that upper-tier of place which has fuller, richer meaning? Casey certainly believes so, pointing out that many famous fictional travel narratives such as the Odyssey involve what he calls “an immediate, unpremeditated engagement with a particular place rather than a survey, i.e., a distanced visual perception of the scene . . . Journeys thus not only take us to places but embroil us in them” (Getting Back into Place 276). In arguing that travel “embroils” one in place, however, Casey relies on an “immediate” and “unpremeditated” encounter with place. Such descriptors might work well with fictional travel narratives, but The Book of John Mandeville’s depiction of place cannot reasonably be called “unpremeditated,” since the book comes across as a sort of guide, carefully curated for a utilitarian purpose. It fits the “distanced visual perception of [a] scene” much better, but here is where the tiers of place can come into play. The Book of John Mandeville may always be at a distance when compared with fictional narratives, but its distance varies depending on the location discussed. That is to say, it takes on a “closer”—perhaps “more immediate”—view for certain locations, giving the audience a greater feeling of “being-in-place” for those locations. It cannot match the Odyssey in this regard, but as long as sections of the text accomplish it relative to other sections, the sensation remains.
The Book of John Mandeville takes its audience to more upper-tier places at certain points, but it also takes them to those lower-tier places—the “India” places (which, of course, Mandeville actually does describe!). Travel that takes the audience to places in a less authentic, more “placeless” way might be termed “tourism.” Tourism is that form of visiting a place without fully “being-in-place” and appreciating it in all its aspects. In engaging with tourism, locations never rise above the lower-tier sense of place. The sense of place is inauthentic, reduced to the barest level of meaning, or that meaning which is only imposed onto the location or its observer by outside forces, not the meaning which the place itself projects. As Relph writes, “An inauthentic attitude to place is nowhere more clearly expressed than in tourism, for in tourism individual and authentic judgement about places is nearly always subsumed to expert or socially accepted opinion, or the act and means of tourism become more important than the places visited” (83). The critical role of landscape-as-place is missed in the act of tourism, too:
The camera is indispensable to the tourist, for with it he can prove to himself and to his neighbors that he has actually been to Crater Lake. A snapshot that failed to register is lamented as though the lake itself has been deprived of existence. Such brushes with nature clearly fall short of the authentic. Tourism has social uses and it benefits the economy, but it does not enjoin man and nature. The appreciation of landscape is more personal and longer lasting when it is mixed with the memory of human incidents. (Tuan, Topophilia 95; emphasis mine)
Obviously, in The Book of John Mandeville, cameras are not a concern, but the presence of landscape at all is. Mandeville chooses whether or not to describe the landscape; when it does so, it is inscribing the location with a sense of place (and the audience with a sense of being-in-place) that goes beyond mere tourism. It is seeing and depicting in those moments the “enjoinment of man and nature,” to borrow Tuan’s phrasing.
Ultimately, The Book of John Mandeville invokes the landscape in a few different locations, but it primarily does so in one particular area: the Holy Land. By going into detail on the physical landscape in this section of the work, the text differentiates the location from all others. It grants the region a greater sense of place, reminding the audience that that section of the work is meant to be a true pilgrimage guide. The other regions, with their lack of landscape detail, are depicted as tourist locations, not holy sites worthy of something as meaningful as pilgrimage.
The importance of the Holy Land in The Book of John Mandeville is not a surprise, and its role as the focus of the work is not a new discovery. During the Middle Ages, Europeans saw Jerusalem as the metaphorical center of the world. Symbolic maps such as the T-O maps in which the world is depicted as an evenly divided circle place Jerusalem at the epicenter of that circle, out of which all dividing lines emanate. This depiction was a natural extension of the religious beliefs of medieval Europe, and these maps “expressed the beliefs and experience of a theological culture that places Christianity—and its topographic symbol, Jerusalem—at the center” (Tuan, Topophilia 41).
The Book of John Mandeville follows this convention, but it also goes one step further and asserts that Jerusalem is the actual, physical center of the world. The text begins by telling the audience that Jesus died in “Jerusalem, which is in the middle of the world.” Iain Macleod Higgins notes that this statement is unusual in his edition of the text, pointing out that,
The idea of a central Jerusalem goes back to a fourth-century Christian reading of Ezek. 5:5, but few pre-twelfth-century geographical writings mention it, and (with one exception) Jerusalem was not placed at the center of pre-thirteenth-century world maps. The Mandeville author makes more of this idea than most. (The Book of John Mandeville 4)
Mandeville “making more” of Jerusalem’s centrality has not gone unnoticed by critics. Martin Camargo observes that “Mandeville’s world is circumscribed by a circle of which the midpoint is Jerusalem” (71); Geraldine Heng concurs, writing, “Although [The Book of John Mandeville] pragmatically presents the world as a sphere amenable to circumnavigation, the narrative’s theological imagination also simultaneously insists that the earth’s sphericity has a midpoint, identified as Jerusalem” (258).
The unconventional structure of The Book of John Mandeville, however, has inspired some critics to reject the centrality of Jerusalem in the text due to “the extension of The Book’s world into the Far East,” which, in the eyes of these scholars, “signals a break with the Jerusalem pilgrim’s view of the world” (Higgins 40). This argument is perhaps best summarized by Christian K. Zacher in his book, Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth-Century England, where he writes, “Mandeville’s book effectively subordinates pilgrimage to a form of travel motivated by love for this world. Ultimately, though Mandeville speaks of the divided earth as if it were two equal halves, his greater interest is not in the commonly known Christian world but in the vast, unknown, non-Christian sphere lying beyond” (140). Note Zacher’s assertion that Mandeville’s greater interest is in the Asian and African portions of the text, not in the Holy Land section. For Zacher, the central focus of the text is not in Jerusalem at all, but in all of the non-Christian areas. Even Heng, who, as shown earlier, agrees that Mandeville claims Jerusalem to be at the physical center of the earth itself, believes that the thematic, metaphorical center of the text is not in Jerusalem, but in western Europe, specifically England and France:
A travel narrative like ‘Mandeville’s,’ which articulates each far-off country on an implied or explicit scale of distance from Europe, and especially from England and France [. . .], also constitutes the rest of the world as the periphery of Christian Europe (anchored by England/France), with home as the locus from which concentric circles of distance irradiate. (249)
In this line of thinking, everything in Mandeville is in the “periphery,” and the center is not actually in Jerusalem, but rather, in the author’s homeland.
What these scholars miss, and indeed, what even the advocates of Jerusalem-as-center miss, is that the text absolutely privileges Jerusalem and the Holy Land, but it does so in a subtle way that often goes unnoticed: through greater description of the physical landscape and topography of the region. This act of place-making often goes unnoticed; the typical scholarly evaluation of Mandeville’s Holy Land can perhaps best be summarized by Suzanne M. Yeager:
Mandeville describes the Holy Land according to the history which had happened there, and not from its fourteenth-century physical description. Thus, in most places in [The Book of John Mandeville], the Holy Land has a textual rather than actual existence, in that descriptions are given according to what happened or was said there according to biblical literature. (132)
Under this framework, the physical geography of the region is absent from Mandeville, and the only place-making occurs in the text’s relating of biblical narrative to the surrounding areas. Mandeville certainly does do just that at many points, and the effect is striking. Consider its description of the rock of Calvary, where Jesus was said to have been crucified:
Also, inside the church to the right side near the church choir is the mount of Calvary where Our Lord was placed on the cross, and it is a rock colored white with a little red mixed into it in some places. This rock was is split and that cleft is called Golgotha. There the blood from Our Lord’s wounds dripped when He hung on the cross, and this Golgotha is reached by steps. And there in this cleft Adam’s head was found after Noah’s Flood as a sign that Adam’s sins would be redeemed in this same place. And on this rock Abraham made his sacrifice to Our Lord . . . (46)
This is an effective bit of place-making, to be sure. It describes the location in terms of what it means to people, specifically, to medieval Christians. Several biblical stories are joined together, ranging from the story of Adam, the very beginning of time, to Christ, the fulfillment of God’s grace, urging the audience, when they visit this place, to call to mind “their” entire history. The audience gains a similar sense just by reading the passage—it is likely that the text was read in the Middle Ages to also bring audiences closer to a “textual, fantasized” Jerusalem that was “crucial in the process of spiritual reform” (Yeager 132).
But while this description of Calvary does an admirable job of place-making, it is missing that integral part of a sense of place: the physical landscape. The Book of John Mandeville, however, does incorporate descriptions of the landscape, particularly in the Holy Land and its adjacent localities. When the Mandeville author is guiding his reader through the region surrounding Mount Sinai, he walks his reader through both biblical history and through the land itself:
Also, in front of the gate is the well where Moses struck the rock and water came out. From this abbey one climbs the mountain of Moses by many steps, and there one finds a church of Our Lady where she encountered the monks when they were running away from the flies. Higher up on this same mountain is the chapel of Elijah the prophet. [. . .] From this mountain one passes through a large valley to go to another mountain where Saint Catherine was buried by the angels of Our Lord. In this valley there is a church of [the] Forty Martyrs, and the monks of the abbey often sing there. And this valley is very cold. Then one goes up the mountain of Saint Catherine, which is much higher than the mountain of Moses. And there where Saint Catherine was buried is neither a church nor a chapel nor any other dwelling. But there is a cairn of stones arranged around the spot where her body was placed by the angels. (The Book of John Mandeville 38).
This description is a remarkable example of place-making, going beyond even the Calvary description. The connections to biblical events and other events of Christian history are still here: the reader sees the rock which gushed forth water upon Moses’s striking it; a church in the spot where Mary encountered monks “running away from the flies”; a chapel dedicated to Elijah; and the burial spot of Saint Catherine, who apparently was buried by angels.
But notice, too, how these stories of human activity (or divine activity, depending on one’s perspective) are blended with descriptions of the landscape, suggesting a fundamental link between the natural and cultural. From the rock struck by Moses “one climbs the mountain,” then they continue to ascend to Elijah’s chapel. Later, the pilgrim travels through a cold valley to scale another mountain, and on that mountain, at the spot where Saint Catherine is buried, there is a cairn—a manmade monument, but one made out of the surrounding natural landscape, not as shaped by human hands as a chapel or abbey would be. There is something gained, too, in the sense of ascension that the landscape description here evokes in the reader. By climbing out of a cold valley and rising in elevation, there is a sense of motion appropriate for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land (or, in this case, its neighboring but still sacred regions).
At other times, the landscape description in the Holy Land turns to the purely practical, but even this use elevates the sense of being-in-place for the reader. When discussing “the Desert between the Church of Saint Catherine and Jerusalem” and how to reach the town of Bethlehem, The Book of John Mandeville tells the reader, “From Hebron one goes to Bethlehem in half a day, if one wants to, for it is only five leagues away, and there is a very fine and very pleasant road through plains and woods” (42). This point is one of only a handful of moments where the text provides practical travel advice about the landscape. The description of “very fine and very pleasant” road and its surrounding natural environment is unique to this section, but it is this very description that brings a sense of being-in-place to the reader. Any reader of Mandeville hoping to make the pilgrimage to the Holy Land could see her- or himself in this scene, along this road, since this is the exact kind of concern she or he would have (i.e., “how do I get from point A to point B, and what is the condition of that route?”). Most descriptions of actual traveling in Mandeville are similar to another example, when the author is describing traveling between two cities in China: “From this city one goes through the country through many cities and through many towns to a city that has the name Jamchay [Yangchow, or Yangzhou]” (128). Road conditions apparently do not matter, nor do the names of all the cities and towns one travels through. Compared to the road between Hebron and Bethlehem, there is less of a sense of place here.
Practical considerations of the landscape that give the reader the sensation of being-in-place continue throughout The Book of John Mandeville’s Holy Land section. At one point, Mandeville tells its readers and would-be pilgrims about Mount Joy, which is “a very beautiful place and most delightful, where Saint Samuel the prophet lies in a beautiful tomb.” Immediately, the author does the same thing to this place as he does with most other locations in the Holy Land and connects it with a Christian historical figure. But, just as in the passages discussed above, he goes further and discusses the sensation of physically occupying this place, saying, “from this place the pilgrims coming from these regions first see the holy city of Jerusalem” (57). Mandeville is inviting its reader to put her- or himself in this place, to really imagine what it would be like to stand in that landscape. Again, there are practical implications, too, as it lets the audience know where they will first see Jerusalem. The sense of being-in-place is heightened. Soon after, the author uses this same technique again, this time in discussing the Mount of Olives:
Above this valley is the Mount of Olives, and it has this name because many olive trees grow there. This mountain is higher than the city of Jerusalem is and therefore one can see from this mountain almost all the streets of the city; and between the mountain and the city there is only the valley of Josaphat, which is not very wide. From this mountain Our Lord rose to Heaven on Ascension Day and [the imprint of] His left foot is still visible in the rock. (58)
This description, again, has all the hallmarks of authentic place-making: connection with biblical history, description of the landscape, practical information, and a sense of actually being-in-place at this location.
Compare the above moments to many of the descriptions of the regions beyond Europe and the Holy Land, such as the one quoted above, where the author describes travel thus: “From this city one goes through the country through many cities and through many towns to a city that has the name Jamchay [Yangchow, or Yangzhou]” (128). Note the blasé way in which the author mentions that the traveler “goes through the country through many cities and through many towns.” There is no sense of place-making or placeness here, or if there is, it is only of that lowest-tier. The reader gains no insight into what makes those many cities and many towns and that country a unique place. She or he just passes through, checking the locations off on an itinerary.
When the text does go into detail on specific locations outside of Christendom, it avoids commenting on the physical landscape, instead opting for a brief description of the people or cultural practices. When combined with the enumeration approach, this technique fails to give the same sense of being-in-place that Mandeville’s Holy Land sections achieve. For example, when describing many of the islands near India, Mandeville proceeds as so:
Later beyond this valley there is a large island where the people are quite as big as giants twenty-eight or thirty feet tall . . . Yet we were told that on another island over there, there were considerably bigger giants, such as forty-five or fifty feet tall . . . There is another island southwards in the Ocean Sea where there are many wicked and very cruel women, and they have precious stone in their eyes . . . There is another island, very beautiful and good, and large and well-populated, where the custom is such that on the first night that they are married they have another man lie with their wives to take their virginity and they give them a good reward for this . . . After there is another island where the women mourn a great deal when their children are born . . . Beyond this island there is another island where there is a great abundance of people and they do not eat for anything the flesh of the hare, the hen, or the goose . . . (169–71)
Notice the lack of landscape description and the rapid-fire list of places. The closest thing to landscape description here are words like “large,” “beautiful,” and “good.” The rest of the description gives a brief summary of the people or their cultural practices. [2] These descriptions call to mind a sense of tourism, a sort of disconnect between the traveler and the place. There is a feeling similar to one of Relph’s descriptions of tourism, in which he observes that it “seems that for many people the purpose of travel is less to experience unique and different places than to collect those places” (85). Mandeville and, by extension, his audience, are likely not feeling the same sensation of being-in-place as they are in the Holy Land sections. Instead, they are “collecting” these many places in order to say “been there, seen that.”
It might be observed that it is not as though landscape description is entirely absent from the sections outside of the Holy Land. Descriptions of places like Mount Olympus in Greece, which “is so high that it reaches above the clouds” and on which “the air is so pure that no wind or breeze blows” certainly stand out, as well as the Sandy Sea in Prester John’s kingdom, or the infamous Perilous Valley with the Devil’s Head (The Book of John Mandeville 13, 162, 166–9). But these moments feel short and episodic, and they often lack the practical insight of the Holy Land landscapes and the integration with religious history that evokes a sense of pilgrimage for the reader. The Perilous Valley can be said to feature the latter, and Yeager does a wonderful job of analyzing the metaphorical implications of the episode (133), but even so, it stands out as unusual and is not indicative of a pattern in the Asia sections of the text. Other landscape descriptors are practical, but they seem to only be mentioned to highlight how awful a place is, such as when Mandeville discourages the route to Jerusalem that entails going through Tartary since it “is a most miserable land, sandy and not very fertile” (The Book of John Mandeville 80). Such descriptions do little to heighten a sense of being-in-place, and in fact seem to encourage the reader to not dwell or think on those areas too much.
In the end, the reader of The Book of John Mandeville is left with two distinct feelings from the two distinct sections of the text. When she or he reads the section on Jerusalem, the Holy Land, and the immediate surroundings, there is a sense of being-in-place appropriate for a pilgrimage, that most holy form of travel. This sensation is thanks to the section’s heavy use of landscape description, which is an important component to the sense of place. The other sections, however, do not evoke this same feeling, as they opt not to describe the landscape in the same detail. As a result, The Book of John Mandeville appears to be both a pilgrimage and a tourism guide, but its true center is with the pilgrimage and the Holy Land.
Bibliography
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Camargo, Martin. “The Book of John Mandeville and the Geography of Identity.” Marvels, Monsters, and Miracles: Studies in the Medieval and Early Modern Imaginations. Ed. Timothy S. Jones and David A. Sprunger. 67–84. Print.
Edward S. Casey. Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. Print.
---. Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002. Print.
Heng, Geraldine. Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy. New York: Columbia UP, 2003. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 18 December 2015.
Higgins, Iain McLeod. “Defining the Earth’s Center in a Medieval ‘Multi-Text’: Jerusalem in The Book of John Mandeville.” Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages. Ed. Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1998. 29–53. Print.
Relph, Edward. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion Limited, 1976. Print.
Tilley, Christopher. A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1994. Print.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1977. Print.
---. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. New York: Columbia UP, 1974. Print.
Yeager, Suzanne M. Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. Print.
Zacher, Christian K. Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth-Century England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. Print.
[1] Of course, as Iain Macleod Higgins notes in his introduction to the work, the actual author of the text is unknown (xviii–xix). For the sake of convenience and readability, this paper simply refers to the author, when necessary, as “Mandeville.”
[2] The ellipses in the quotation, it should be noted, do not omit any further description of the landscape, only the details of the cultural practices.