"I wish to say no more about such marvels as are there, so other people might travel there and find new things to describe"
The Travels of John Mandeville
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The Normate World Falls Apart
Chapter thirteen ends with an admission that his quest to physically travel and represent all the diversity in the world is a failure. "Many other maner of peple beth theraboute, of wham hit were to moche to telle," (1896-1897). It is significant that this admission comes directly after his description of the hermaphrodites in lines 1892-1895. It is as though the hermaphrodites, while not being the last of the diverse people he describes, sit in the exact middle or cross beyond of the available tools of categorization (both meanings for the prefix "trans"). After the hermaphrodites, Mandeville has reached his breaking point and has to stop speaking. Mandeville's silence, the absenting of a voice that has dominated and structured the world through narrative, acknowledges the other peoples in the world and the other voices that may now be allowed to speak for themselves. In the Defective Middle English version, he admits his limitations for containing diversity by leaving room for other travelers and writers. "I wish to say no more about such marvels as are there, so other people might travel there and find new things to describe, things I haven’t mentioned or described, because many people very much like and desire to hear new things" (Anthony Bale 124). From the onset, Mandeville's second pilgrimage was motivated by the desire for diversity which he calls the desire "to hear new things." In one sense, Mandeville has accomplished this in the goal of his journey to the margins, he has described many things pushed away from the bodies and imagination of England. Yet in another sense, he can only accomplish this goal by stopping his narrative and allowing other voices to speak. For to hear new things means not only to hear about them, but to hear from them directly. Mandeville cannot and does not speak for the hermaphrodites.
Mandeville choses to end his narrative travels, yet the text goes further, suggesting that no man, even a powerful, ablebodied, cisgender Christian man, can physically embody the diversity of the whole world by speech or deed. At last, as though gasping for air, Mandeville concludes by admitting that his pilgrims narrative cannot possibly contain all the marvelous things in the world: "There are many countries and marvels I have not seen, therefore I can’t describe them correctly" (Bale 123-124). Despite giving the impression of semi-omnipresence and omniscience in his mapping of places and peoples, it is at the end of his journey that he finally confesses the limits of being a body moving through space. He is becoming conscious of the instruments and methodologies of his pilgrimage. Mandeville has limited vision, he can only see in his way and cannot see other things, in other ways. Furthermore, he is limited in his ability to speak. His words do not reveal all things as an object truth but are shaped by the limits of his capacity to know and communicate. More information would require the gaze and voices of other people. "Moreover," adds Mandeville, "in countries which I have visited there are marvels that I haven’t described, as it would take too long" (Bale 123-124). Mandeville's pilgrimage produces a kind of mappa mundi but one limited and distorted by the shape of his travels. Pilgrimage as more than static maps but rather it is the embodied movement and limitations of movement through space that shapes places and peoples of the world. The mappa mundi and the pilgrim change from nouns with pre-determined forms, objects of transcendent truths, into the actions and productions of mapping, worlding, embodying, peopling, and pilgriming.
In fact, reversing the traditional promise of the first pilgrimage to the center of the Christian world to make a person healed and whole, the conclusion of the second pilgrimage to the islands of the anti-loca sancta is to make Mandeville into a broken and diverse embodiment of the margins. By the end of the second pilgrimage, he has not only stopped speaking, he has effectively lost the ability to speak. This occurs, in part, because he has lost the ability to walk. In the Cotton version of the text, he writes that he has lost the ability to walk because of an "arthritic gout" (185). Losing the ability to move as he had in his pilgrimage takes away Mandeville's power to structure space by moving through it. Instead, he becomes more like the place-locked peoples he describes, like the hermaphrodites and Amazons. In any case, his desire to contain difference at once fringing on neurotic and his ableist attempt to be everywhere and all things is proven impossible, wearing down his body. Thus, not only does Mandeville become spatially locked like those on the margins but his body becomes crip, loses its status as ablebodied that he had when he was living in the center of the Christian world. Mandeville leaves Jerusalem like one of the people of power and returns to it as one of the freaks from the margins. Indeed, it is Mandeville's choice to offer his body to Rome as embodied cultural authority that transform pilgrimage from a process of healing into a process of marginalizing, cripping, freakening. The last work of his pilgrimage is to make Mandeville into a monster, a body that shows the diversity of the world and the diversifying effect pilgrimage has on space and the body. Rather than merely look and recording the difference of the Hermphrodites, Mandeville becomes crip and becomes hermaphroditic.
In fact, reversing the traditional promise of the first pilgrimage to the center of the Christian world to make a person healed and whole, the conclusion of the second pilgrimage to the islands of the anti-loca sancta is to make Mandeville into a broken and diverse embodiment of the margins. By the end of the second pilgrimage, he has not only stopped speaking, he has effectively lost the ability to speak. This occurs, in part, because he has lost the ability to walk. In the Cotton version of the text, he writes that he has lost the ability to walk because of an "arthritic gout" (185). Losing the ability to move as he had in his pilgrimage takes away Mandeville's power to structure space by moving through it. Instead, he becomes more like the place-locked peoples he describes, like the hermaphrodites and Amazons. In any case, his desire to contain difference at once fringing on neurotic and his ableist attempt to be everywhere and all things is proven impossible, wearing down his body. Thus, not only does Mandeville become spatially locked like those on the margins but his body becomes crip, loses its status as ablebodied that he had when he was living in the center of the Christian world. Mandeville leaves Jerusalem like one of the people of power and returns to it as one of the freaks from the margins. Indeed, it is Mandeville's choice to offer his body to Rome as embodied cultural authority that transform pilgrimage from a process of healing into a process of marginalizing, cripping, freakening. The last work of his pilgrimage is to make Mandeville into a monster, a body that shows the diversity of the world and the diversifying effect pilgrimage has on space and the body. Rather than merely look and recording the difference of the Hermphrodites, Mandeville becomes crip and becomes hermaphroditic.
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Back to the Center
While the end of the traditional pilgrimage is to return from the center to the margins, the cycle of the second pilgrimage is to come back from the margins to the center of Christianity, "tornyng homwarde to Rome" (2840). While supposedly from England, Mandeville calls Rome home. The margins may give rise to the diversity of crip, trans, and intersex bodies of pilgrims yet while most pilgrimages involve a return to these places of origin, Rome or Jerusalem continue to signify "home" for many Christians. These Loca Sancta are the physical embodiment of the City of God on Earth. Indeed, the allegory of the pilgrims journey is the leaving behind of the earthly point of origin to end at last in Heaven, used in varying levels of transparency but perhaps most famously portrayed in the 17th century Pilgrims Progress. However Mandeville challenges the norms of the pilgrim's journey by traveling from the center of the Christian world to the margins, he nonetheless ends his travels and his narrative back in Rome. This return marks the limits as well as the strategy of Mandeville. He can challenge but not totally resist the power Rome has to orient space and bodies toward it. Yet throughout his narrative, Mandeville demonstrates the ability to turn expectations towards his alternative agenda. Although Mandeville returns to Rome, he is not the same man. Mandeville has become different, become crip, become hermaphroditic, transgressing boundaries of place and embodiment. In returning to Rome, Mandeville presents himself central authorities in order to evidence that his loop is more like a spiral, containing more every time is leaves and never totally resolving back into itself.
The purpose of the trip back to the centers of Christianity is for Mandeville to present himself and his book as proof of the diversity of the world, "to showe my book to the holy fader, the pope, / and telle to hym mervayles whoch Y hadde y-seye in diverse contrees" (2840-3). Mandeville and his book have effectively become "monsters" working to show the center the truth of the diversity that exists on the margins. In turn, Mandeville hopes that the central authorities of the Christian world would verify his account of diversity, "so that he, / with his wise / consayl wolde examine hit with diverse peple that beth in Rome" explains Mandeville. "For / ther beth in Rome evermore men dwellynge of diverse nacions of the worlde." Unexpectedly, Mandeville trust in Rome to verify his embodiment of diversity is based not on the innate centrality and wholeness of the people there but because the center itself has become a collection of diverse peoples with whom the Pope can seek advise. By the end of Mandeville's second pilgrimage, perhaps as soon as the conclusion of chapter thirteen, diversity has turned from a marginal quality to escape into a point of authority. Mandeville's vision of authority is a council with the diverse nations, from the various peoples and places of the world. Does this include representatives from the Island of Amazons and Hermaphrodites? The monsters of the world move from the margins to the center of knowledge and Mandeville's hope is that this world council will authorize that his book embodies that diversity.
The purpose of the trip back to the centers of Christianity is for Mandeville to present himself and his book as proof of the diversity of the world, "to showe my book to the holy fader, the pope, / and telle to hym mervayles whoch Y hadde y-seye in diverse contrees" (2840-3). Mandeville and his book have effectively become "monsters" working to show the center the truth of the diversity that exists on the margins. In turn, Mandeville hopes that the central authorities of the Christian world would verify his account of diversity, "so that he, / with his wise / consayl wolde examine hit with diverse peple that beth in Rome" explains Mandeville. "For / ther beth in Rome evermore men dwellynge of diverse nacions of the worlde." Unexpectedly, Mandeville trust in Rome to verify his embodiment of diversity is based not on the innate centrality and wholeness of the people there but because the center itself has become a collection of diverse peoples with whom the Pope can seek advise. By the end of Mandeville's second pilgrimage, perhaps as soon as the conclusion of chapter thirteen, diversity has turned from a marginal quality to escape into a point of authority. Mandeville's vision of authority is a council with the diverse nations, from the various peoples and places of the world. Does this include representatives from the Island of Amazons and Hermaphrodites? The monsters of the world move from the margins to the center of knowledge and Mandeville's hope is that this world council will authorize that his book embodies that diversity.
The need for this authorization is that no one body or pilgrimage can embody the whole diversity of the world, "for as moche as many man troweth noght but that they se with her owen / eye other that they may conseyve with her kyndely witte" (2838-2839). The "kindly wit" means the power of generosity to perceive others and it also means the limits of a mind to comprehend difference only in terms to what it knows and is, of what is of like "kind" to it. The movement towards the other, the anti-loca sancta, is an encounter with a difference that challenges and breaks down traditional forms of knowledge, yet the return to the center acknowledges that this difference will be framed and distorted by the kinds texts and contexts that pre-exists its the same limited archive. The radical "troweth" of the other becomes limited by the "eye" and "witte" of the self. Indeed, despite the diverse peoples present to consul the Pope and authorize Mandeville's second anti-loca pilgrimage, the final word on his narrative is premised on a pre-existing text in Rome that prefigures (and predetermines) all he says.
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Cycles of Change
In Rome, after Mandeville presents his challenging account of the world, the central authorities offer him a book of their own, "a Latin book containing all this and much more, according to which the book Mappa mundi is made, a copy of which book he showed to me" (124). Even the vernacular English (as well as other languages) used to describe the new content must be translated and confirmed in the authoritative Latin. Only after this pre-text confirms the new that veracity is known, "[t]herefore the Holy Father the Pope has ratified and confirmed my book in all topics" (Bale 124). For the medieval mind, it was not the new and innovative that was trusted but the old, traditional, and familiar. The center (Jerusalem, Rome, God) functions like a quilting point, returning back only to extend out again among new and unheard of peoples and places. Put another way, Rome functions like the Latin Book to which all authorities must reference: the Bible. As far as Christian authorities travel to include more and more into its world, just as Augustine in response to the existence of Hermaphrodites, in the end the Christian world must find room for it in the pre-existing text at the center of the Faith. In returning to the Book and the City at the center of it all, it changes each time the pilgrim returns to it from some Anti-Loca Sancta with new eyes and new wits. In the end, pilgrimage is cyclical in reflection of Christianity's phases of life, death, and resurrection that are played every year through the liturgical seasons. Christmas gives way to Lent and in turn to Easter. In a temporal mode, the passing of time functions like the circular movements of the pilgrim. On each turn and return, the pilgrim sees the center and the margins in new ways.
Containing people, books, and maps of all the diversity of the world, Rome demonstrates that the center contains the margins. It is literally and figuratively a world power, Rome, that takes the place of God to be the universal translator of all difference. All things come from God and return back to God. In the Cotton version, Mandeville ties his second pilgrimage, to the anti-loca sancta, back into the final Christian authority, the divine map of the world, "who is three in one, without beginning and without end, without good quality, without great quantity, present in all places, and containing all things and whom no good can improve nor no evil harm" (185). Without this description of God as the great unifier across difference and place, the Defective version nonetheless concludes with a prayer to Divine authority as well as a nod to the Worldly authority of the Church in Rome. Yet with this prayer, Mandeville confirms that his vision of the worlds diversity is not only present in the diverse peoples and texts of Rome's earthly authorities but in the divine mind itself. Mandeville (and the Pope) possesses a limited knowledge that will always alter the truth of difference to fit into pre-existing categories, languages, and maps. The eternity of God then is represented in the pilgrimage not only as a singular central point, a Primium Mobile from which God never turns, but as a kind of infinite loop. God is constantly flowing out into the world, towards the margins, and back into itself as in a pilgrimage. This image of God then need not make all things the same in its oneness. The divine map knows "all places" differently and "all things" in their diversity. Unlike the "kindly wit" of humanity, Mandeville's image sees God in present everywhere and in all things in their particularity, as C.S. Lewis writes, "He can think of all, and all different" (Perelandra).
By the end of the book, Mandeville has wandered so far and wondered so much that the narrative has almost forgotten its initial orientation towards Jerusalem. After several chapters in which dozens of diverse lands and peoples are viewed very quickly almost as though Mandeville is speeding up in his travels and narration in an orgy of difference, trying to jam as much in as possible, reveling in multiplicity. An image of this center, as an able-bodied white Christian male, Mandeville is nonetheless drawn across boundaries, longing to contain difference that will always escape him, suggesting the cyclical nature of the pilgrim himself as at once one and multiple, like and unlike, here and there, center and margin. Without explicitly identifying with all his different places and peoples, Mandeville nonetheless rejects static boundaries for the self or his world. He may not be "transgender" but he may be "gender fluid," rejecting a definitive place, orientation, physical state or national State for his body. In this sense, he is "trans." Instead of an orthodox English or Christian nationalism, he exhibits trans-nationalism, a cross identification with peoples of other nations. In the process Mandeville's narrative imagines him as a man of crossed, straddled, and blurred boundaries. He shows himself on the road as pilgrim working towards becoming-diverse, becoming-crip, becoming-Amazon, becoming-hermaphrodite. Even if he never arrives at absolute difference and dissidence to the central forms of authority, Mandeville suggests an allegiance to orthodox centrality yet remains ever in tension with a heterodox marginality that keeps its story open at its ends.
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