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God’s Chosen Peoples: Christians and Jews in The Book of John Mandeville

Theresa Tinkle, University of Michigan

Sir John Mandeville alternately admires and denigrates Jews. At some points, he pictures Jews as the irredeemable Other, torturers and murderers of Jesus, enemies of all Christians: “thanne schal other Iewis speke Ebrew to hem [the Jews of the ten tribes] and lede hem to cristendome for to destruye cristen men.”1 At other points, he describes Jews who mirror Chris-tians: “thithere come Iewes ofte in pilgrimage with grete deuocion,” just as Christians do (p. 44). The reader encounters in turn passages that create tendentious differences between the two faiths, and passages that insist on sameness. Given Mandeville’s contradictory attitudes toward Jews, his work is not best understood as either particularly tolerant or unequivo-cally anti-Jewish, though these are the terms typically employed in modern scholarly discussions. Some critics have applauded Mandeville’s tolerance toward religious differences, despite the fact that “tolerant” surely misrec-ognizes a writer who regularly expresses the hope that benighted others will convert to his faith.2 Other scholars have called attention to notable anti-Jewish passages, often remarking that Jews are the exception to Man-deville’s usual tolerance.3 The polarized terms of the discussion—“tolerant,”

I am grateful to Charles D. Wright and the anonymous reader for JEGP for thoughtful responses to an earlier version of this article.

1. The Defective Version of “Mandeville’s Travels,” ed. M. C. Seymour, EETS, o.s. 319 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), p. 112. I modernize orthography, replacing the thorn with th, the yogh with gh, y, or g. Mandeville’s Travels is a modern title; throughout, I retain the medieval Book of John Mandeville. 2. Those emphasizing Mandeville’s “tolerance” include Donald R. Howard, “The World of Mandeville’s Travels,” The Yearbook of English Studies, 1 (1971), 1–17; Christian k. Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 130–57; Donald R. Howard, Writers and Pilgrims: Medieval Pilgrimage Narratives and Their Posterity (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980), p. 67; Sebastian I. Sobecki, “Mandeville’s Thought of the Limit: The Discourse of Similarity and Difference in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville,” Review of English Studies, 54 (2002), 329–43. 3. A number of studies have greatly complicated our understanding of Mandeville’s nega-tive attitudes toward Jews, and I am particularly influenced by the following: Benjamin Braude, “Mandeville’s Jews among Others,” in Pilgrims and Travelers to the Holy Land, ed. Bryan F. Le Beau and Menachem Mor (Omaha: Creighton Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 133–58; Scott D. Westrem, “Against Gog and Magog,” in Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination

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“anti-Jewish”—fail, I think, to capture literary nuances, let alone the force of the whole. Representational unity is not a distinguishing characteristic of Mandeville’s encyclopedic Book, a compilation stitched together from many, not always compatible sources.4 Indeed, I propose that Mandeville does not set forth a single, coherent representation of either Christians or Jews. Instead, he repeatedly reinvents Jewish-Christian relations, writ-ing and rewriting the relationship through multiple episodes, developing contradictory attitudes, alternating between dependence on and separation from Judaism, and ultimately revealing a profound ambivalence toward the Other that is also essential to the Christian self. Some of Mandeville’s ambivalence follows from Christian supersession-ism, a fourth-century theory that became dominant in medieval Chris-tendom and that initially structures Mandeville’s notions about Chris-tian-Jewish relations. This theory rests on several premises: Jews did not recognize the spiritual meaning of their scriptures; Jews lost their chosen status by not recognizing Jesus as the Messiah foretold in those scriptures; Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus; God therefore punished Jews with the loss of the Temple and their chosen status. This theory helped transform early Jesus-followers from a Jewish sect into a separate people, Christians, chosen by God to supersede the Jews.5 kathleen Biddick em-

in the European Middle Ages, ed. Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), p. 54–75; kathleen Biddick, “The ABC of Ptolemy: Mapping the World with the Alphabet,” in Text and Territory, ed. Tomasch and Gilles, pp. 268–93; Linda Lomperis, “Medieval Travel Writing and the question of Race,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 31 (2001), 147–64; David B. Leshock, “Religious Geography: Designating Jews and Muslims as Foreigners in Medieval England,” in Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages, ed. Albrecht Classen (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 202–25; Rosemary Tzanaki, Mandev-ille’s Medieval Audiences: A Study on the Reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville (1371–1550) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 21, 219–58; Frank Grady, Representing Righteous Heathens in Late Medieval England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 1–16, 45–72, 123–32; Evelyn Edson, “Travelling on the Mappamundi: The World of John Mandeville,” in The Hereford World Map: Medieval World Maps and Their Context, ed. P. D. A. Harvey (London: The British Library, 2006), pp. 389–403; Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representa-tions of Islam and the Orient, 1100–1450 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2009), pp. 112–54; Miriamne Ara krummel, Crafting Jewishness in Medieval England: Legally Absent, Virtually Pres-ent (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 69–88. Iain Macleod Higgins demonstrates that the level of anti-Jewish sentiment varies with the particular translation and version of Mandeville’s work: see Writing East: The “Travels” of Sir John Mandeville (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), pp. 16–17, 42–45, 80–81. 4. Howard comments cogently on the effects of Mandeville’s encyclopedism: “World of Mandeville’s Travels,” p. 1; Writers and Pilgrims, p. 55. The extent of his encyclopedism is ap-parent in Iain Macleod Higgins’s meticulous analysis of sources, “Defining the Earth’s Center in a Medieval ‘Multi-Text’: Jerusalem in The Book of John Mandeville,” in Text and Territory, ed. Tomasch and Gilles, pp. 31–45; see also Higgins, Writing East, p. 11, on the contradictions that arise from the work’s form. 5. For an excellent analysis of this theory, see Sarah Pearce, “Attitudes of Contempt: Christian Anti-Judaism and the Bible,” in Cultures of Ambivalence and Contempt: Studies in Jewish-Non-Jewish Relations, ed. Siân Jones, Tony kushner, and Sarah Pearce (London: Vallentine

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phasizes the linear temporal logic of supersession: Christians “posited a present (‘this is now’) exclusively as a Christian present. They cut off a Jewish ‘that was then’ from a Christian ‘this is now.’”6 According to this logic, Judaism could be represented as part of a world that had passed, as a former religion rather than a coeval one. If Christians superseded Jews, however, they also depended on Judaism for their scripture, their Messiah. The Jewish past was not necessarily cut off from the present. Medieval writers often treated Judaism as a “spectral” pres-ence within Christendom, as in Steven F. kruger’s compelling formulation: the Jewish past was at once dead and threateningly alive, thus “spectral.” kruger emphasizes the ambivalence embedded in supersessionary thinking: “[T]hough Judaism survives, the new temporal scheme that Christianity puts in place attempts to settle it as past, ‘conjuring’ it away. But the very act of conjuration suggests that the hoped-for effect of the performative [work of historical thinking] does not in fact pertain, that Jews and Judaism are not fully past, but rather still disturbing and disruptive—‘haunting’—enough to Christianity’s sense of its own hegemony to necessitate the act of conjura-tion. Further, the attempt to conjure Jews away also serves to conjure them up, into a certain presence: defining Jews as past involves simultaneously recognizing their (ongoing) role as Christianity’s ancestor.”7 Judaism was at once past and present, repudiated and depended upon, superseded and the source of Christian identity. Even the temporal logic of supersession was fraught with ambiguity. As Daniel Boyarin cogently remarks, “‘Supersession’ can . . . be understood in two ways. It means either that Israel has been con-tradicted and replaced by the church or that Israel has been ‘continued’ and fulfilled in the church.”8 From the Christian perspective, the polemical identification between the two cultures fostered an anxious dependence on that which was supposedly abject, a repudiation of that which was integral to the self.

Mitchell, 1998), pp. 10–71. I am influenced also by studies about how Jews are invented to suit the purposes of Christian theology: David Rokéah, “The Church Fathers and the Jews in Writing Designed for Internal and External Use,” in Antisemitism Through the Ages, ed. Shmuel Almog, trans. Nathan H. Reisner (Oxford: Pergamon Press for the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, 1988), pp. 44–65; Gavin I. Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990), p. 201. 6. Biddick, The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), p. 1. 7. kruger, “The Spectral Jew,” in New Medieval Literatures, vol. 7, ed. Rita Copeland, David Lawton, Wendy Scase (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998–2005), p. 17, with discussion of “spectral presence” at pp. 15–28. 8. Boyarin, “The Subversion of the Jews: Moses’s Veil and the Hermeneutics of Superses-sion,” Diacritics, 23 (1993), 27. Akbari, Idols in the East, draws on Boyarin’s definition to analyze Mandeville (pp. 112–13, 138–39). See also the splendid analysis by Elisa Narin van Court showing how the dual forms of supersession shape Piers Plowman: “The Hermeneutics of Supersession: The Revision of the Jews from the B to the C Text of Piers Plowman,” The Yearbook of Langland Studies, 10 (1996), 43–87.

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The ambivalence inherent in supersession is evident from the begin-ning of Mandeville’s Book. He opens the work by envisioning a “lond of biheest” promised to both Jews and Christians (p. 3). Mandeville names Jesus the “kyng of Iewis” in the “lond of Iewis,” insisting at once on God’s original land covenant with Jews and on their loss of that land: after Jesus dies, the land is “hight til vs [Christians] in heritage” (pp. 3, 4). This con-denses supersession to a cogent main idea: Jesus’s death motivates God’s dispossession of Jews and election of Christians. The Christian heritage encompasses a legal right, a historical claim, and an allotted place.9 It is not a gift. Although Christians assert a divinely sanctioned right to the land, they, like Jews before them, must gain it by military force: “eueryche good cristen man that may . . . schulde strengthe hym for to conquere oure right heritage” (p. 4). The Prologue treats the Christian heritage as both a bequest and an obligation, a place allotted to Christians and Jews but not at the moment possessed by either group. Nor is the land the only Christian heritage: Christ also gives his followers “the feith and the lawe,” neither of which is bound to a particular place (p. 3). Mandeville’s Prologue defines faith, law, and land as uniquely Christian; at the same time, he makes Christianity supplementary to Judaism, the origin of the messianic king, and the source of the heritage. From the start, Mandeville’s narrative encourages Christians both to identify with the Biblical chosen people, and to despise them as deicides unworthy of the promised land. If the work begins with supersessionary ambivalence toward Jews, it progresses toward something more severe: Jews imprisoned in Gog and Magog, deep in the Caspian Mountains, where they await the chance to escape so that they may murder and subjugate Christians. In the course of the journey east, Mandeville clearly rewrites Christian-Jewish relations. Much as the Book engages the reader in a gradually unfolding production of sameness and difference, so does the following argument, which seeks to tease out the interpretive adjustments Mandeville requires of his reader in the process of paging through the work. In the first part of the work, the journey to the promised land, Mandeville develops the Prologue’s su-persessionary ambivalence toward Jews, God’s first chosen people. As the narrator travels further east, he gradually reinvents Christian supremacy over Jews, a narrative effort that climaxes in the myth of Gog and Magog. Finally, near the end of the book, Mandeville describes idealized people in the far east, Bragmen and others, who adhere to Old Testament te-nets of faith and know nothing of the New. They are (mutatis mutandis)

9. Middle English Dictionary, s.v. heritage: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/, accessed June 20, 2012. Suzanne M. Yeager develops a richly persuasive analysis of this concept, Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008), pp. 120–23.

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Biblical Jews in all but name, and superior to Christians in virtue. These peoples embody nonthreatening contemporary versions of Judaism. As Mandeville surveys God’s relations with these people, he renders Christian supersession and exceptionalism at best problematic, at worst subversively undermined. By the work’s end, Christianity appears to harbor few universal truths, while the ancient books of the Jews emerge as a widely disseminated guide to divine law. Mandeville’s complicated treatment of Jews and his bold theology constitute significant contributions to later fourteenth-century English vernacular writing about religion. Nicholas Watson defines key features of this literary movement, which he calls “vernacular theology”: lay narrators present themselves as reliable Biblical exegetes, address a wide and unknown lay audience, write in the vernacular, and engage sig-nificant theological issues.10 Mandeville participates in this movement, and his sketches of various Biblical religions can greatly deepen and enrich our understanding of contemporary “vernacular theology.”11

Clearly, the Book is never about real Jews. There are certainly “spec-tral” Jews here, to recall kruger’s apt theorizing. There are also “virtual” Jews, to call upon Sylvia Tomasch’s discerning work: in the absence of actual Jews, the “virtual” Jew consists of an illusory, constructed image, a sign without a real referent.12 Jews in this work are images expressive of Christian identity, anxieties, and beliefs. In this work as in innumerable others, Christian identity is formed in relation to Judaism. Mandeville’s narrator identifies with Jews as fellow monotheists, the source of Christian scripture, worshippers of the one true God; Judaism gives Christendom an ancient and prestigious origin. He also defines Christianity by op-position to Judaism, projecting onto Judaism what does not belong in

10. Nicholas Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Ver-nacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409,” Speculum, 70 (1995), 822–64. 11. I am not the first to analyze Mandeville in relation to vernacular theology: see Nicholas Watson for Mandeville’s contributions to universalism, “Visions of Inclusion: Universal Salva-tion and Vernacular Theology in Pre-Reformation England,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 27 (1997), 147, 151–52, 169; and see also A. C. Spearing, “The Journey to Jerusalem: Mandeville and Hilton,” Essays in Medieval Studies, 25 (2008), 1–17. 12. Tomasch, “Postcolonial Chaucer and the Virtual Jew,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), pp. 243–60. Mandeville can suggest Jeremy Cohen’s conception of “hermeneutical Jews” as well: the Jew as invented to serve polemical purposes in Christian theology, a figure who is so carnal, literalistic, and blind that he cannot perceive the spiritual meaning of his own scriptures, or recognize how the Old Testament points to Christ: see Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1999), esp. pp. 13, 20. I do not find carnality or literalism to be particularly marked features of Mandeville’s Jews, but Grady, Representing Righteous Heathens, pp. 125–31, and Akbari, Idols in the East, p. 113, apply Cohen’s insight to Mandeville’s Book.

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Christendom. That which constitutes identity cannot easily be expelled, however, so Mandeville represents an unstable relation between Christian and Jew, self and sometime Other.13 The narrative exemplifies how Chris-tian identity is troubled by its dependence on Biblical Judaism, the origin that refuses to become part of the past, and that exists in the present as both an unresolved challenge and an exemplary spiritual model.

I. “I IOON MAUNDEUYLE”

The work’s narrator identifies himself as an English knight: “I Ioon Maun-deuyle knight, if al it be that Y be not worthi, that was ybore in Engelond in the toun of seynt Albanes, and passid the see in the yere of oure lord Ihesu Crist [1332]” (p. 5). “John Mandeville” claims to inhabit a particu-lar Anglo-French moment as a traveler, mercenary soldier, and devout pilgrim.14 Early readers accepted him at his word. The fact that the Book was originally composed in French (ca. 1357) would not contradict his claim, for England was trilingual at this time, and facility in French hardly precluded the author being English. The work was translated into English four times before 1400, quickly becoming part of England’s vernacular literature.15 The town Mandeville names as his birthplace was real, whether or not he was born there. Some external evidence confirms Mandeville’s self-portrait.16 He was at one time celebrated as a native son in the Bene-dictine abbey at St. Albans, where an effigy of him, complete with spurs, was reported in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.17 This particular abbey memorialized St. Albans, a soldier who converted to Christianity and was martyred for his faith. Mandeville implicitly takes the ancient warrior for his patron saint in the Book, suggesting a continuing battle

13. Stephen Greenblatt comments insightfully on the instabilities that arise from Man-deville’s attempts to construct difference but does not apply his insight to Jews: Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 43–51. 14. Jennifer R. Goodman demonstrates the interdependence of chivalry, romance, and literature of exploration, allowing us to discern the coherence in Mandeville’s “chivalric autobiography”: Chivalry and Exploration 1298–1630 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998), pp. 12, 45–77, 151. 15. For fascinating hints about Mandeville’s links to England in the peculiarly international “Anglo-French moment” of the later fourteenth century, see Josephine Waters Bennett, The Rediscovery of Sir John Mandeville (New York: MLA, 1954), pp. 170–216; Michael J. Bennett, “Mandeville’s Travels and the Anglo-French Moment,” Medium ævum, 75 (2006), 273–92; C. W. R. D. Moseley, “Chaucer, Sir John Mandeville, and the Alliterative Revival: A Hypothesis concerning Relationships,” Modern Philology, 72 (1974), 182–84. 16. Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences, pp. 206, 272–73, compiles references to Mandeville in, for example, the records of St. Albans (p. 272). 17. J. Bennett, Rediscovery, p. 213; M. C. Seymour, Sir John Mandeville (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993), p. 34.

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against the enemies of Christendom—a battle centered in England and having both spiritual and military aspects. St. Albans initiates two of the Book’s dominant themes: pilgrimage and Crusade.18 The Book thus opens as a narrative about England and English identity, by an author who was an accepted chivalric figure in English cultural history.19 Readers of the time took the fictional English author-persona at face value, their expectations reinforced by the many other authors whose personas assume their own names (e.g., “Geoffrey Chaucer” in The Canterbury Tales). Although Mandeville was a recognized historical figure and his Book was widely read in England, he cannot certainly be recovered from history.20 The English work obviously stems from the separate labors of author, re-dactor, translator, and scribe(s). Although each is theoretically important, I shall refer to the collective author function simply as “Mandeville,” for my interest is in the work’s historical potential for meaning, not its genesis. For the same reason, I reference, throughout, the Defective version, the form of the work that circulated most widely in England, and that formed the basis for all early print editions.21 This version offers a reliable basis for understanding how Mandeville was presented to English readers in the first centuries of reception. The author’s chivalric persona merits attention. When this version of the Book began circulating in the later fourteenth century, military tri-umph was often regarded as evidence of divine justice. A little more than a decade after Mandeville supposedly began his pilgrimage, king Edward III interpreted his victories at Crécy (1346) and Calais (1347) as signs of God’s will. In 1348, J. W. Sherborne reports, Edward “was celebrating and honouring the blessing which God had bestowed upon him and his realm through the great victories at Crécy and Calais. These had demonstrated

18. Yeager, Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative, pp. 6–7, 12–13, 108–34, persuasively analyzes the interlocking themes of Crusade and pilgrimage. 19. On the centrality of England to the Book, see Yeager, Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative, pp. 9–10, 15, 108–34; and Akbari, Idols in the East, pp. 53, 64–65. 20. The question of authorship has accumulated more speculation than answers; for a review of prior arguments and a new candidate for author, see Seymour, Sir John Mandeville, pp. 1–2, 11–15, 23–24. J. Bennett, Rediscovery, pp. 170–216, proposes one of the English Mandevilles as author. M. Bennett, “Anglo-French Moment,” pp. 273–92, adds new evidence to this hypothesis and argues persuasively for a (now unidentifiable) English author writing in a context of Anglo-French cultural exchange. 21. I rely on M. C. Seymour, “The Early English Editions of Mandeville’s Travels,” The Library 29 (1964), 202–7; and C. W. R. D. Moseley, “The Availability of Mandeville’s Travels in England, 1356–1750,” The Library, 30 (1975), 125–33, for details about manuscript and print circulation. Moseley rightly remarks that circulation does not constitute influence (p. 128). For the sake of brevity and readability, I cite only the Defective version, though my comparison with Cotton and Egerton indicates that the major lines of my argument apply to those versions as well, not surprisingly, as both are based mainly on Defective. Space prohibits developing the comparison here.

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that the Almighty endorsed the justice of Edward’s claim to the throne of France.”22 Some Insular manuscripts dated ca. 1360–75 include a dedica-tion to king Edward III that praises him as the “ornament of Christen-dom,” “the unconquered prince, follower of the wonderful Alexander.”23 Although the dedication may be an interpolation, and is often considered one, it is possible that the author could have presented a copy of the Book to Edward III. M. Bennett points out that language of the dedication conforms to the king’s own seal, and reasonably concludes that “it is . . . hard to imagine any author of French secular literature in the 1350s not seeking to bring his work to the attention of Edward III,” particularly when the king was receiving accolades for his military triumphs.24 Whether or not Mandeville (or someone else) presented his Book to king Edward, the idea that God decides military contests clearly had cultural currency. As a self-proclaimed knight, Mandeville places himself among the rolls of warriors by whom God enacts the military triumphs that declare his judgment on history and his choice of a particular people to possess a land, whether that be Calais or Judaea. The idea that God chooses victors becomes less than comforting when wars are lost, and this is what happened in the Crusades, a long series of disastrous defeats for Christians, who had captured and lost Jerusalem centuries before Mandeville’s composition.25 When he was writing, the Christian heritage in the Middle East, the ancient Jewish land, had long been secured by “Saracens,” a word denoting pagans and/or Muslims. The logic of military supremacy that had established Jews and then Chris-tians as God’s chosen peoples in the past called both into question from the later fourteenth into the sixteenth century, as the Ottoman Empire expanded into territory once held by Jews’ and Christians’ forefathers.26 Jews had won and lost the holy land in the ancient era, but so had Chris-tians in the recent medieval past. Since military victory signified divine election, had God’s favor passed from Jews to Christians to Saracens? Medieval Christians tended to perceive Saracen victories as “‘a permanent

22. Sherborne, “Aspects of English Court Culture in the Later Fourteenth Century,” in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne (London: Duckworth, 1983), p. 8. 23. P. Hamelius, ed., Mandeville’s Travels, Translated from the French of Jean d’Outremeuse, Edited from MS. Cotton Titus C. XVI, in the British Museum, 2 vols., EETS (1923; repr. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961), II, 14. 24. Bennett, “Anglo-French Moment,” p. 281, my emphasis. 25. The Crusaders captured Jerusalem in 1099 but lost it in 1187. They gained and lost the crucial eastern city of Acre several times; the loss became irrecoverable after a devastat-ing defeat in 1291. For a readable Crusade history, see Jonathan Phillips, “The Latin East, 1098–1291,” in The Oxford History of the Crusades, ed. Jonathan Riley-Smith (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999, 2002), pp. 111–37. 26. Robert Irwin sketches out the rise of the Ottomans in this period: “Islam and the Crusades, 1096–1699,” in Oxford History of the Crusades, ed. Riley-Smith, pp. 250–57.

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divine scandal, insofar as God, in his impenetrable wisdom, had armed, trained, and assured the victory of evil and lies.’”27 The Book argues strenu-ously against this implication, explicitly affirming a belief in Christian supremacy against the self-evident fact of Christian military failure. The need for considerable argument on this point divulges uncertainty about the hermeneutics of Saracen triumph. Presenting himself to the reader as an English knight, Mandeville makes himself part of the many failed Christian attempts to conquer the holy land. A knight is conventionally a “noble” figure, but in this context he represents a chivalric authority severely compromised by history.28 Indeed, the author’s choice of persona establishes Christendom in a defensive posture, already judged by God, obviously in need of moral and spiritual reform. Mandeville attempts to stand apart from other knights, to identify with the God who judges rather than with the sinners in need of reform: “now pruyde, enuye, and couetise hath so enflawmed the hertis of lordis of the world that thei beth more besy for to disherite here neigheboris than for to calenge or conquere here right heritage” (p. 4). He recom-mends Crusade as a form of penance for these contentious knights. The ideal of penitential warfare makes him sound old-fashioned: according to Jonathan Riley-Smith, a penitential theory of Crusade was commonplace in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries but was largely abandoned by the fourteenth century.29 Advocating for Crusade, the narrator clings to a difficult supersessionary logic: only God’s chosen people will be victorious, so Christians will ultimately be victorious—as soon as the (other) lords repent of their sins. The call for Crusade expresses the narrator’s chivalric piety, his willingness to submit to divine judgment as a knight should do, in battle, and, not least of all, his adherence to a belated idea of Euro-pean supremacy. At the same time, his explicitly lay status foregrounds his participation in a literary culture that fosters experimental vernacular theology. Old-fashioned and compromised as a chivalric authority, he is nonetheless self-assured as a lay person writing about religion.

II. THE ANxIETIES OF SUPERSESSION

From the very start of the pilgrimage, Mandeville treats Christian conquest as part of a former age, marked as a distinctly bygone history. The journey

27. Hichem Djaït, quoted in Jeremy Cohen, “The Muslim Connection or On the Changing Role of the Jew in High Medieval Theology,” in From Witness to Witchcraft: Jews and Judaism in Medieval Christian Thought, ed. Cohen (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997), p. 145. 28. Compare Higgins, Writing East, pp. 52–57, who emphasizes Mandeville’s nobility. 29. Riley-Smith, “The Crusading Movement and Historians,” in Oxford History of the Cru-sades, ed. Riley-Smith, pp. 33, 77–80, 83, 89.

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to the holy land repeatedly exposes the ruins of former Christian great-ness; each route maps places gained and lost in prior wars.30 The journey into loss begins in Constantinople, where a statue of Justinian once held an apple, token of his lordship; the apple has fallen and cannot be restored, for “the emperour hath lost a grete partye of his lordschip” (p. 7). As the narrator proceeds, Mandeville comes to Tyre, “somtyme a faire cite of cristene men, but Sarasyns haueth destruyed hit a grete partye” (p. 18). Nearby, Acre “was a cite of cristene men somtyme, but it is now destruyd” (p. 19). The brevity of expression hides the trauma of the loss, for the fall of Acre ended the Christian hold on the eastern Mediterranean. A bit further on, Haifa “was somtyme a gode cite” of Christians, “but it is now al waast” (p. 20). Beersheba too was “somtyme a feire and a likyng toun of cristen men” (p. 23). Still further on, where the Crusader Baldwin once built a castle and “put hit into cristen men hondis to kepe,” now dwell “many cristen men vndir tribute” to Saracens (p. 43). In Shechem “theire was sometyme a chirche bot it was casten doune” (p. 44). The formulaic litany of loss contrasts what “somtyme” was (fair cities, churches, castles) with what now is (waste land, abandoned churches, fallen castles). Chris-tians have lost the holy land, their rightful heritage, and dwell, if at all, in subjection to Saracens. After a long string of humiliating defeats in the Crusades, Mandeville’s contemporaries face a scandalous reality: they have been supplanted by Saracens. The loss of the promised land links Christian and Jewish histories: “This lond of Ierusalem hath ybe in many dyuerse naciouns hondis, as Iewis, Chanens, Assyriens, men of Perce, Medoynes, and Massydoynes, Grekys, Romaynes, cristene men and Sarasyns, Barbarynes and Turkes and many other nacions” (p. 28). Christians are buried in a long list of those who once held the land, beginning with Jews and ending with “many other nacions,” apparently too numerous or disheartening to name. The very length of the list implies a flaw in the doctrine of divine election, for the succession of triumphant armies challenges any notion of either Jewish or Christian exceptionalism. The narrator hastens to restore the theodicy he has implicitly undermined. The list proves, he explains, that “Crist wole not that it [Jerusalem] be in the hondis of traytours and synneris, be thei cristene men other other. And now haue the mysdoyng men holde that lond in here hondis xl. yere and more, but thei schal not holde it longe if God wil” (p. 28). Mandeville asserts that Christ “wol not” that sinners

30. Martin Camargo perceptively analyzes this theme: “The Book of John Mandeville and the Geography of Identity,” in Marvels, Monsters, and Miracles: Studies in the Medieval and Early Modern Imaginations, ed. Timothy S. Jones and David A. Sprunger, Studies in Medieval Culture, vol. 42 (kalamazoo: Western Michigan Univ., Medieval Institute Publications, 2002), pp. 73–79.

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hold the city. Since sinners do in fact occupy Jerusalem, he can only wait to see “if God wil” allow them to continue to do so. The reader wavers uncertainly between the negative “Crist wole not” and the conditional “if God wil.” The passage equivocates over precisely the point at issue: does God will each conquest or does he not? The history of occupied Jerusalem would suggest that God will soon replace whoever holds the city, but the idea that only the chosen inherit the place has been compromised. The narrative passes from this difficult point into the more reassuring distant past, when Constantine rode to victory, with Christ’s nails form-ing the bit in his war-horse’s mouth (p. 30). Witnessing to God’s favor, the Emperor expanded Christendom, winning “Assye, Turkye, Damazyn the more and the lasse, Surrye, Ierusalem, Arabye, Perse, Mesopotayne, the kyngdome of Analpe, Egipt the highe and the lowe, and other kyng-domus many vnto wel lowe in Ethiope and vnto Ynde the lasse that th-anne was cristine” (p. 30). This roll call of places won for Christ re-verses the litany of loss encountered in the approach to the holy land, as if the narrative seeks to recover what armies have lost. The losses remain current, however, and the victories part of the past. In the pres-ent, “all thilke londis beth now in payems and Sarasyns hondis. But when God wol, right as these londis beth lost with synne of cristen men, so schal thei be wonne ayen by help of God thurgh cristene men” (p. 31). Mandeville insists that his deity controls the outcome of battles, that Christians will ride in triumph “when God wol.” Saracen victory becomes paradoxical proof of Christian election: God is punishing Christians for their sin. According to this logic, whether Christians win or lose, they remain at the center of historical events, and their fate manifests God’s will. At the same time, the defunct nature of Constantine’s victories raises questions about God’s will for the present. The possibility that Christians are just one people in a long line of con-querors, their glory now past, resurfaces when the narrator describes the temple in Jerusalem. The temple is built and destroyed many times, as suc-cessive peoples occupy the land. Solomon’s temple endures for the curiously specific “m., an C., and two yere,” before the Roman Titus tears it down as retribution after, as Mandeville has it, the Jews illegally crucify Christ (p. 33). The Jewish crime here is not deicide but insubordination (the unauthorized use of capital punishment, employed without the Emperor’s express permis-sion). Later, when Julian the Apostate allows Jews to rebuild the temple, there “come an erthequakyng, as God wolde,” destroying it once again (p. 33). In his turn, Hadrian refurbishes the temple and allows only Christians into it. Christians supersede Jews through a Roman proxy, making Christian occupation dependent on pagan force. Even this dubious quasi-supremacy quickly passes. In the narrative present, Saracens have replaced Christians

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and take their turn worshipping in the temple. The place appears equally sacred to Jews, Christians, and Saracens, each of whom occupies it accord-ing to the fortunes of war that purportedly express God’s will. Christians’ minor, former place in this sequence awkwardly undermines the narrator’s desire to establish the supremacy of Christian over Jew, for the narrative reveals the triumph of Saracens over both Christians and Jews. Some of the Book’s Saracens in fact see themselves as supplanting both Jews and Christians. Where Saracens hold the holy places once taken by Jews and Christians, for instance, they forbid their religious predeces-sors from entering into their inheritance. At the tomb of the patriarchs, neither Christians nor Jews can enter, “for thei [Saracens] holde cristene men and Iewis but as houndis” (p. 24). Mandeville makes the same point using milder language when he describes the templum domini, forbidden to those “foul men,” Christians and Jews (p. 32). Saracens see both groups as impure, even subhuman. The parallel between Christians and Jews is defined by the sins of each: as the “Saracens seith,” “Iewis beth wickid men for thei kepe noght the lawe whiche Moyses toke to hem. . . . [and] cristen men beth wickid for thei kepith noght the maundementis of the gospels” (p. 60). From the represented Saracen perspective, Jews and Christians both deserve to be supplanted for their sins. The two subordinated reli-gions are unhappily equal: “Iewis paiyng tribute as cristen men dooth” (p. 45). The journey to the holy land reveals the extent of Christian military defeats, and calls into question—at least from the Saracens’ perspective—Christian avowals of religious supremacy. The Saracens identify Christians with Jews, the other chosen people once conquered by a vastly superior military force. A version of the logic of supersession allows Saracens to assert religious victory over Christians, much as Christians justified their triumph over Jews: in each case, military victory signals God’s choice of one people over another. While Saracens see Christians and Jews as similar in their abjection, the narrator discovers other connections between the two peoples who have possessed the holy land. From the narrator’s point of view, ancient Biblical sites are as holy as post-Biblical relics. Every moment of early Christian history stems from Jewish history; many places evoke the past glories of each religion as well as the decay and dispossession of both in the pres-ent. The land is holy precisely because it bears witness to many layers of Jewish and Christian history. The reader encounters this effect vividly in Babylon, where one site recalls the “faire chirche of oure lady,” the place to which she resorted during the flight into Egypt; the same place holds the “body of seynt Barbara virgine”; it is also where “dwellid Ioseph when he was ysold of his bretheren”; and finally it held the oven into which Nebuchadnezzar threw the three children of Israel, and into which “God sonne go with these children thurgh the fuyre” (p. 21). The Gospels,

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early Christian history, and Jewish scripture alike are appropriated to a Christocentric interpretation, and the distinction between Christian and Jew disappears. Joseph and the children of Israel become hermeneutically part of Christian history, made to testify to how “God sonne” intervenes in human lives. Christianity appears continuous with Judaism, sharing the same holy places and reverencing the same deity. Likewise, Mount Calvary is the site of the crucifixion and the place where Noah found Adam’s head after the flood, “in tokene that the synnes of Adam schulde be bought in the same place”; nearby, pilgrims find the site of Abraham’s sacrifice, where Christian kings of Jerusalem once worshipped (p. 29). Many places exhibit similar hermeneutically interdependent layers of Jewish and Christian history. Although the Prologue declares that Chris-tians replace Jews as the chosen people, the journey through the holy land repeatedly suggests that Christianity continues Judaism. Mandeville presents supersession in both of Boyarin’s senses: as continuation and as replacement. The former implication tends to work against the latter, to suggest the incompleteness of Christianity without its Jewish roots. Mandeville’s holy land resembles a palimpsest in which the Jewish past is not fully erased but remains visible and alive in the Christian present.31 Because the Old Testament figures forth the New, the Christian sites can-not be understood without reference to the Jewish past: the Old Adam is redeemed in the New; Joseph is sold into Egypt in anticipation of Christ’s flight into Egypt; Abraham’s sacrifice is fulfilled at Christian altars. Judaism irrupts into the narrator’s Christian pilgrimage in the form of signposts to God’s former favor and as the origin of Christian practice. Jonathan Gil Harris comments insightfully on similar “untimely irruptions” of the past, theorizing this literary effect as “the temporality of explosion: the apparition of the ‘old’ text shatters the integrity of the ‘new’ by introduc-ing into it a radical alterity that punctuates the illusion of its wholeness or finality.”32 Throughout Mandeville’s journey into the holy land, the Jewish past continually irrupts into the narrative present, revealing Christianity’s dependence on Judaism and rendering dubious his assertions that the Jewish past has been surpassed. A striking example of such “untimely irruption” appears in Mandeville’s description of the lost Jewish temple vessels. Mandeville tells the reader how Titus carried the temple ornaments to Rome, and the length of his account argues for the Jewish “relikes’” importance:

In that arke was the ten comaundementis and of Aaron yerd and of Moyses yerd with the whiche he departid the Rede See whanne folk of Israel passid

31. I borrow the idea of palimpsestic temporality from Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), pp. 13–19. 32. Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare, p. 15.

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ouer drie fote. And with that yerd he smote on the rochis and the water come out of hem, and with this yerd he dide many wondris. And ther was a vessel of gold ful of manna and clothyngis and ornementis and the tabernacle of Aron. And there was a table square of gold with xii. preciouse stones, and a beost of iasper grene with iiii. figures and viii. names of oure lord withynne, and vii. candelstikkis of gold, and xii. pottis of gold, and iiii. ensensours of gold, and an autre of gold, and iiii. lyouns of gold vpon whiche thei hadde a cherubyn of gold xii. spanne long, and a tabernacle of gold, and xii. trumpes of siluer, and a table of siluer, and vii. barly loofes, and alle other relikes that were bifore that Crist was bore. (p. 34)

The Jewish holy objects are nostalgically remembered and given place in the narrative present, much as Christian relics are. The many gold temple objects suggest the vast wealth of Jews, potentially playing to negative stereotypes, but the presence of so much gold also glorifies and elevates ancient worship, conceivably challenging Christian superiority. The Book offers this description as a way of recapturing the lost objects for the devout Christian imagination, and in this the text accomplishes what an actual pilgrimage cannot: a vision of the origin of all sacramental objects. The Jewish “relikes” have a greater literary authenticity, in fact, than many Christian relics, which are all too often falsified by monks for their own commercial gain (p. 7), exist in multiple versions (the numerous heads of St. Johns, p. 45), or provoke controversies about their legitimacy. In comparison with the lost temple vessels of the Jews, the Christian relics scattered through the Book could seem poor and dubious signs of divine presence, not at all suggestive of a triumphant Christendom. The motif of lost artifacts connects Christians with Jews, and some “re-likes” are even shared (the Ten Commandments). Just as Jews saw their temple destroyed, so have Christians seen their churches pulled down and emptied of treasure by the military might of a new empire. The fact that God deploys human armies to punish his peoples deepens the parallel: as he uses Romans to castigate Jews, he uses Saracens to chastise Chris-tians. The deity punishes each of his chosen peoples in much the same way, with loss of the holy land and subjection to a greater military force. Mandeville’s journey to the holy land thus presents contemporary readers with uncomfortable messages about Saracen triumphs, about Christian loss and shared abjection with Jews. The description of the holy land reveals the anxieties that arise from supersessionism in an age of military defeat. Supersession can suggest continuity or contradiction; Mandeville emphasizes both. The doubleness of his supersessionary logic contributes to an unstable representation of Judaism. Supersession as contradiction leads Mandeville to picture violent Jews, killers of Christ who nail their Messiah to the cross lying down, to increase his suffering. They crown him four times with different thorns to intensify his anguish; they choose the

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wood of the cross to signify their victory over him. By contrast, supersession as fulfillment generates identification, evidenced in images of a shared history. Hence Mandeville pictures a seed planted in Adam’s head grow-ing into the wood of the cross, an organic image of the unbroken lineage that binds sin and redemption in Christian theology. Christianity gains an ancient history and authority by appropriating the Jewish past. Jews appear necessary to Christian salvation, in that they originally receive and pre-serve knowledge of the one God. They are as well Christ’s first followers, and the narrative dwells on the disciples’ Jewish heritage. As Peter says to Christ on Mount Tabor, “It is good to be here, make we thre tabernaclis” (p. 47). Jewish architecture fuses with the doctrine of the Trinity, creat-ing supersession as fulfillment. Christendom’s originary dependence on Jewish believers only compounds the ambivalence of supersession. In the first part of the work, Mandeville both severs the Christian present from the Jewish past and knits them tightly together. Judaism is an inescapable, spectral presence in the holy land.

III. SUPREMACY REINVENTED

At the end of the journey to the holy land, the fraught tensions among Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are left behind, and Mandeville turns to develop a supposed closeness between Christianity and Islam. Now he insists that Muslims share with Christians a reverence for the Virgin Mary, belief in the incarnation and in Christ as a righteous prophet, and faith in the gospels (pp. 56–58). Christianity and Islam are indeed so close that Muslims may be “lightlich conuertid” (pp. 58, 59). The supposed doctri-nal similarities produce a common antipathy to Jews. According to the “Alkaron,” Jews are “wickid” because they “wole not trowe that Ihesu Crist was sent fro God” (p. 58). Finally, Islam incorporates a Christian theory of election: “thei [Saracens] wote wel . . . by here prophecyes that the lawe of Macomet schal faile as the Iewis lawe is yfayled, and . . . the cristen lawe schal laste to ende of the world” (p. 58). If the earlier narrative makes Is-lam the primary threat to Christian supremacy, generating readers’ doubts about their place in the divine scheme, this assertion powerfully answers those doubts. Saracens’ triumphs are merely temporary, contravened by their own prophecies that their “lawe” “schal fail,” just as the “Iewis lawe is yfayled.” No longer does Judaism mirror the abjection of Christianity; instead, Judaism prefigures the future fall of Islam. Mandeville develops this revisionary narrative further through a speech he gives to the Sultan of Babylon. The Sultan initially pictures Christians as the “foul men” Saracens bar from holy places. He points

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out the prevalence of sin in Christian Europe—gluttony on holy days, wrath, pride in fashion—and sermonizes about the virtues Christians should show, including meekness, truth, and charity. Yet the Sultan limits the implications of Christian sin, arguing that it does not lead to loss of divine favor. To the contrary, he confirms Christian election:

bicause of youre yuel lyuyng and youre synnes youre God hath yeue al this londis into oure hondis. And we haue hem noght thurgh oure owne strengthe but al for youre synnes, for we woote wel forsothe that what tyme so ye serue wel youre God, thanne he wole helpe yow so that no man schal do agens you. And we wote wel by oure prophecyes that cristen men schal wynne this lond agen when thei serue wel here God. (pp. 60–61)

The Sultan allays the threat to Christendom that arises from the spread of Islam. By using the Sultan to affirm Christians’ chosen status, Man-deville represents his own particular truth as if it were a universal truth self-evident to natural reason. Saracens do not defeat Christians through superior military force, but because God gives them the land. Saracens are no more than agents in God’s punishment of his chosen people. Mandeville paradoxically rationalizes recent military defeats as progress toward Christian triumph, as proof that whom God loves he also chastises. This confirmation from outside Christianity is necessary in part because the unity of Christendom has been eroded in the course of Mandeville’s journey, vitiating the authority of Christian spokesmen. As he recounts his travels toward and through the holy land, the narrator demonstrates that Christians have not one but many churches, each with its own prac-tices and doctrines, each claiming to possess the true faith. Greeks differ from Romans; Jacobites believe what James taught them; Georgians follow Saint George’s teaching; Nestorians, Samaritans, and many others add to the confusing multiplication of Christian laws (pp. 48–50). Mandeville emphasizes the diversity that characterizes Christianity: “echon of these haue somme articlis of oure treuthe, but echone varieth fro other” (p. 50). Truth becomes not a universal but a relative term: “oure treuthe” differs from their truth, even if “we” call ourselves Christians. Through the Sultan, Mandeville presents a plausible external witness to the truth of Christianity, regardless of its internal divisions. The Sultan’s promise that God will in the future return the land to Christians could reinforce readers’ belief that Christians are the chosen people—a belief potentially battered by the preceding narrative. The Sultan serves to deny the threatening possibility that Saracens will con-quer the whole world; he forcefully articulates the idea that Christians are the chosen people, secure in their heritage; and he unifies the disparate branches of Christianity by representing all of them as inheriting the promised land. In short, he restores Christian’s chosen status in a way no Christian speaker could. At the same time, Mandeville’s repeated as-

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sertions of Christian election suggest the diminished explanatory power of the idea. It is one of the more subversive implications of the Book that Christian supremacy cannot simply be taken for granted, that it must be reiterated again and yet again. It must be expressed by non-Christians to be persuasive. Ironically, at this point Mandeville frees Christianity from its dependence on Judaism by making his faith dependent on Islam, at once rewriting Christian-Jewish relations, and re-creating the problem of dependence on the Other. The Sultan marks a turning point in the text. Before Mandeville’s inter-view with him, Christians are deeply entangled with and dependent on Jew-ish history. From here on, the narrative minimizes Jews and aligns Christians with Saracens. As Mandeville travels further east, he encounters Christians and Saracens living harmoniously together, with few Jews among them. In the land of Mancy, there “dwellith cristene men and Sarasyns,” peaceably sharing in the fruits of the land (p. 89). Chan of Cathay invites both “cristen men” and “Sarasyns” to his court, though he “tristith moost in cristene men” (p. 101). Much as Saracens identify Christians with Jews throughout the holy land, so eastern lords identify Christians with Saracens. This narrative pattern tends to elevate Christians, to legitimate them by means of external witnesses in more powerful, wealthy, and influential cultures. Mandeville’s eastern passage exhibits a Christianity partially recovered—at least in imagi-native terms—from its decline in the west and in the holy land. Christians inhabit the entire world, and they are in some places, in the east, at least equal to Saracens. As Saracens continued to triumph against Christians in battle throughout the first centuries of the Book’s reception, Mandeville’s Sultan gave readers a way to understand history that allayed the threat of Islam. Since Saracens earlier in the text considered Christians and Jews “foul men” and “houndis,” however, readers could feel that their doubts were not fully resolved by the Sultan’s affirmation.

IV. DISIDENTIFICATION

Toward the end of the Book, Mandeville uses the story of Gog and Magog to construct a clearer, more absolute difference between Christian and Jew than the narrative has thus far set forth. Gog and Magog lie far in the east, enclosing a valley where with God’s help Alexander the Great long ago imprisoned the Jews of the ten tribes.33 Mandeville’s version of this

33. For the textual sources of this legend, see Phillips Barry, review of Alexander’s Gate, Gog and Magog, by A. R. Anderson, Speculum, 8 (1933), 264–70; and Charles Burnett and Patrick Gautier Dalché, “Attitudes Towards the Mongols in Medieval Literature: The xxII kings of Gog and Magog From the Court of Frederick II to Jean de Mandeville,” Viator, 22 (1991), 153, 162.

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legend primarily demonstrates the extent of God’s antipathy toward Jews. Alexander’s pursuit of the Jews is unmotivated; we learn only that he seeks to enclose the Jews in the hills by his own power. When this fails, Alexander prays to God to finish the task, and “God herde his preiere and encloosid the hulles togedre,” imprisoning the Jews in a natural fortress (p. 111). Mandeville’s contemporary readers might assume God punishes Jews for the Crucifixion. This interpretation would be anachronistic—Alexan-der lived several centuries before Christ—but that would not necessarily disturb medieval readers. Still, it is significant that Mandeville does not explain God’s disfavor as a consequence of Jews’ role in the Crucifixion, the historical moment at which Judaism is conventionally superseded. Rather, the narrative presents Jews as always already damned. They are not God’s chosen people in the time of Alexander—according to this epi-sode, they never were. Mandeville states that the Jews “of the ten kyndes” (tribes) dwell only in this one place, for they “haueth no lond of here owne” (pp. 111, 112). With this narrative, Mandeville drastically revises the theory of supersession: God never promised Israel to Jews, never gave it to them, and consequently never transferred it to Christians because of Jewish sin. The narrative of Gog and Magog erases Jews from the history of the promised land.34 In retrospect, Jewish claims to the promised land appear at best mistaken. The narrative makes Christians the only chosen people to receive God’s heritage and thereby renders supersession moot. Gog and Magog testifies to Mandeville’s need for an Other at this point in the narrative, and to his desire to separate Christian history from Ju-daism, to expel Jews to some far away land in the east.35 This attempt to reinstate the Other contrasts forcefully with those parts of the narrative that identify Christians with Jews, and that emphasize continuity between the two faiths. The contradictions reveal that this particular otherness is a fragile social construction—not a given, not a natural or inevitable part of social order, and therefore having to be continually reasserted. Man-deville’s polemical othering of Jews predominately signifies “a resistance to identification,” to draw on Ludmilla Jordanova’s perceptive model: it indicates a “genuine fear of being too like, blending with or collapsing into another type of human being. Because self and other are mutually consti-tutive, identification and objectification go hand in hand. Otherness is as much about the construction of oneself, as it is about creating distance.”36

34. Biddick, “ABC of Ptolemy,” pp. 276–81, argues cogently that Mandeville dispossesses Jews and denies them “coevalness.” 35. Leshock, “Religious Geography,” pp. 202–25; and krummel, Crafting Jewishness, pp. 69–88, focus on this passage as analogous to England’s physical expulsion of Jews, passing over evidence of more complex relations between the represented faiths. 36. Jordanova, “History, ‘Otherness’ and Display,” in Cultural Encounters: Representing “Other-ness,” ed. Elizabeth Hallam and Brian V. Street (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 249, 250.

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Gog and Magog deny the Christian narrator’s sometime identification with Jews and mark out impassable geographic and moral differences. The Gog and Magog passage thus responds to the tensions inherent in supersession, between identification and repudiation, between continuity and rupture. The narrative (momentarily) resolves those tensions by the simple feat of rewriting history, discursively securing the Christian heritage against at least one competitor. We should notice what the narrative seeks to expel from Christendom. The Jews of Gog and Magog manifest three features: they know “no spech bot theire owen”; they “haueth no lond of here owne”; and they “schal do myche harm to cristen men” (p. 112). Earlier in the Book, their speech is represented as a foreign alphabet that gestures toward an important system of learning (p. 45).37 In the valley of Gog and Magog, that prestigious language undergoes a symbolic abjection, becoming only the speech of murderous conspiracy, by which in the end days Jews will be able to com-municate with each other so as to destroy Christians. Jews are thereby denied what is arguably their most meaningful role in Christian origins: their command of Scripture. In other words, the narrative represses the history of Jews as privileged recipients and preservers of God’s word. The accompanying geographic dispossession of Jews similarly refuses Jews a part in the promised land. The representation of Jews in Gog and Magog stabilizes the Jewish-Christian relation by tendentiously simplifying it, at once denying the threat of superior Jewish learning and the problem of the Jewish land covenant. The Jews, sometime devout pilgrims to shared holy sites, now become categorical enemies of all Christians. The construction of a common en-emy functions to unify Christians: despite all their differences of faith and doctrine, at least Jews recognize them as one class. The myth of Jewish enemies dispersed throughout Europe also rewrites the inter-Christian warfare with which the Book begins. Whereas in the Prologue Mandeville laments how Christians battle other Christians, now he unites Christians against a greater enemy, the Jews lurking insidiously within their states. The narrative projects Christian military excesses and internal European strife onto Jews. The Jews are conquered and rendered abject in this narrative, but they are not subjugated. Dispossessed of Israel and the whole world, impris-oned in Gog and Magog, closely guarded by Amazonians, they await the end of time, when they will find a way out and pass into many nations, where “thei schal do myche harm to cristen men” (p. 112). Indeed, they shall meet up with Jews dispersed throughout the world, who will “lede hem to cristendome for to destruye cristen men” (p. 112). The combined

37. I build on Biddick’s analysis of alphabets: “ABC of Ptolemy,” pp. 268–93.

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force of Alexander’s might, God’s imprisonment, and diligent Amazonian guards do not suffice to keep Jews contained. Indeed, the imprisonment only increases Jews’ will to violence, so that in a future age, the “the Iewis whiche beth among these hullis of Caspe schal come out and cristen men schal be vndir hem as thei haue be vndir cristen men” (p. 112). In the last brief phrase—“as thei haue be vndir cristen men”—Mandeville alludes to Christian persecution of Jews. Clearly, the text recognizes that oppression can breed violence—can create the Other as an enemy—and anticipates a future in which the roles will be reversed and Jews will exact vengeance. The narrative obviously imputes Christian hatred to Jews, yet, as Magdalene Schultz remarks in another context, “it would only have been natural, after all the wrong done to them, to expect from Jews the most hostile attitude imaginable.”38 Certainly, the narrative of Gog and Magog expresses the anxieties of European oppressors who have for sev-eral centuries extorted, persecuted, and exiled Jews. Mandeville tries to scorn Jewish weakness but ultimately acknowledges the people’s strength of resistance; he represents Jews as punished by God but discovers also the injustice of Christian oppression. Every attempt to resolve ambivalence leads only to further complications, deeper ambivalence, and greater insecurity. Indeed, the narrative leads to a prophecy—“cristen men schal be vndir hem”—that undercuts Mandeville’s numerous prior attempts to affirm Christian supremacy. The theology of supersession allows for only one chosen people at a time, and historical events as well as fictional ones open difficult questions for Christians. Mandeville initially links Christians with Jews in being elect, but also in losing the land of promise. For Jews, he insists that the loss is permanent, whereas for Christians it is temporary. Mandeville’s harsh anti-Jewish turn into the valley of Gog and Magog attempts to ward off the likeness between himself and his Jewish contemporaries, to create a more definite difference between God’s first and second chosen peoples. As Barbara kingsolver memorably puts it, “Those of doubtful righteousness speak of cannibals, the unquestionably vile, the sinners and the damned. It makes everyone feel much better.”39 keenly aware of Christian sins, Mandeville creates Jews as the “unquestionably vile,” allowing readers to feel better about their precarious place in history. He invents Jewish other-ness in order to deny Christian similarity to Jews, and in order to repress a potential parallel between the fall of Israel and the recent military defeats of Christendom. If God hates Jews, he may yet love Christians.

38. “The Blood Libel: A Motif in the History of Childhood,” Journal of Psychohistory, 14 (1986), 1–24; repr. in The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook of Anti-Semitic Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 287. 39. kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible (New York: HarperFlamingo, 1998), p. 174.

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V. GOD’S MANY CHOSEN PEOPLES

Many peoples in the Book claim confidently to know God, yet as the claims pile up, their very number and diversity call human epistemology into question. Christianity itself divides into many sects, with a division be-tween western pope and eastern patriarch signaling the fragmentation of a faith that “schulde be al oon” (p. 12). The patriarch firmly rejects the pope’s avowal of supremacy: “We mowe not suffry thi grete pruyde” (p. 12). Likewise, Prester John lives virtuously, as a Christian, but knows nothing about the “newe addiciouns [to the faith] whiche popes that haue ybe siththe [sic] [the time of the apostles] hath ordeyned” (p. 128). The European Christian “truth” is subject to contestation—and definitely not universal.40 Even non-Christians plausibly assert that they know God. The Great Chan of Cathay has a vision in which a white knight informs him that “God that is almighty sent me to thee” as a promise of military victory (p. 95). Obeying his vision, Chan goes on to conquer many peoples. His conquest recalls Christian imperialist adventures, such as Constantine’s, and conforms to the chivalric narrator’s own logic about divine judgment. Further on in the travels, a people feed the flesh of their dead relatives to the birds, believing the fowls are “the aungels of God cometh to fecche hym and bere hym to paradys” (p. 133). The Book makes knowledge of God a questionable, relativistic claim, at times even a satiric target.41 More than one people believe themselves chosen, but the belief is obviously not sufficient proof of divine election. Toward the end of the Book, a new people emerge as God’s chosen ones: the Bragmen, an exemplary ascetic people dwelling near Prester John’s kingdom. They follow the “lawe of kynde” (nature), eschewing doctrinal subtleties and controversies. Theirs is the “lond of feith,” a heri-tage possessed in the present, not through military achievements but as a gift (p. 125). They exemplify the virtues European Christians have lost: “thei fleeth alle synne, alle vices, and alle malice, for thei beth not enuy-ouse nother proude nother couetous nother lechours nother glotouns” (p. 125). These are significantly the sins that both the narrator and the Sultan charge Christians with committing (pp. 4, 60). The Bragmen also “fulfille the ten comaundementis” (p. 125). Beyond that, their religious doctrines are few and simple: they “trowith in God that made alle thing

40. Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2003) marginalizes this kind of evidence in order to discern a “nominal Christianity that is cosmopolitan and ubiquitous” (p. 270) throughout the world. 41. Spearing establishes that the idea of relativism is present in fourteenth-century texts, and thus not necessarily anachronistic: “Journey to Jerusalem,” pp. 11–12.

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and hym worschipe” (p. 125). As a consequence, God sends them fair weather and neither hunger nor war nor other troubles. Protected from all tribulation, they appear a pre-lapsarian people. It seems to Mandeville “that God loueth hem wel” (p. 125). This religion, the simplest and most devout among those reported in the Book, mirrors Biblical Judaism, with its “lawe of kynde,” “lond of faith,” “ten comaundementis,” and belief in a single Creator. In the Bragmen, Mandeville represents Biblical Judaism as a vital part of the present, an originary monotheism that has clearly not been superseded in this holy land. Thirteenth-century schoolmen developed a theory that natural reason was sufficient to reveal God to all men; this led to the hypothetical possibility of universal salvation (typically excepting Jews).42 Mandeville does not rely on natural reason alone, but on the marvelous circulation of the Ten Commandments, an originally Jewish text supposedly followed by Christians, though the narrative has revealed flaws in that direction. The Bragmen represent an “untimely irruption” of Biblical Judaism into the narrative present. Summing up his travels around the land of the Great Chan, Mandeville discerns unity beneath the superficial religious diversity he has catalogued: “all these men and folk of whom Y haue spoke that beth reasonable haueth somme articlis of oure treuthe” (p. 134). The articles of “oure treuthe,” we might note, are also shared with Judaism: “thei trowith in God of kynde which made al the world, and hym clepe thei God of kynde as here prophecys seith, Et metuent eum omnes fines terre, that is to say, And all endis of erthe schal drede hym [Psalms 66: 6]; and in another place thus, Omnes gentes seruient ei, that is to say, All folk schal serue to him [Psalms 71: 11]” (p. 134). Mandeville’s citations from the Psalms express the common heritage of “all folk”: God’s word. The last people Mandeville describes in his travels continue this theme: these unnamed people also worship the “God of kynde”; and, though they do not know the doctrine of the Holy Ghost “as thei schulde do,” yet “thei can wel speke of the bible and spe-cialiche of Genesis and of the book of Moyses” (pp. 134–35). Resembling the Bragmen, these people derive a “law of nature” from a few books of the Old Testament.

42. For analyses of Mandeville in this context, see Howard, “The World of Mandeville’s Travels,” pp. 8–9; Howard, Writers and Pilgrims, pp. 69–72; Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage, pp. 148–57; Braude, “Mandeville’s Jews,” pp. 139–40; and Spearing, “Journey to Jerusalem,” pp. 12–14. Grady, Representing Righteous Heathens, pp. 1–16, 62–67, 123–32, discerns in such passages a “leveling” of faiths to something like a universal religion, an effect dependent on grouping Christians together with righteous pagans and denigrating the Jewish Other. Watson, “Visions of Inclusion,” pp. 146–87, studies Mandeville in the context of other late fourteenth-century vernacular writers on universalism, recognizing his contribution to this theology. These scholars do not account for the central role of the Old Testament in Man-deville’s inclusive theology.

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Mandeville displaces crucial elements of Biblical Judaism onto idealized peoples in the east, bringing back into the narrative the faith supposedly superseded in the holy land, and then expelled in Gog and Magog. The symbolic expulsion of “the Jews” in Gog and Magog is clearly not the end of the story. Mandeville here reintegrates Judaism (though not named so) as a legitimate Biblical faith, not as a superseded past, not as a spectral presence, but as contemporary, very much alive, and admirable. He repre-sents these eastern religions as alternatives to contemporary Christianity, Judaism, and Islam: potentially universal religions premised on the law of nature and the Old Testament. Mandeville depends almost exclusively on Jewish scripture for his universalism. To be sure, Christians call the Old Testament their own, but it is not exclusively theirs. Mandeville does not draw on the New Testament in these passages: his extreme universal-ism is not Christocentric. Here the truth of nature depends entirely on a simplified version of the Old Testament, passages of which are widely available, entirely accurate, and reverenced throughout the east—in itself a great marvel in a manuscript culture. Genesis, the book of Moses, and the Psalms provide sufficient knowledge of the creator God to become a universal religious text, rendering the New Testament oddly redundant. Being a self-identified member of the laity obviously does not prevent Mandeville from advancing unconventional Biblical interpretations, or from discovering in the Bible the possibility of religions that are neither Christianity nor Judaism. This part of the Book develops an audacious vernacular theology. Toward the journey’s end, doctrine and sect become less important than virtuous living: “al it be so that thei [the inhabitants of the island Synophe] haueth not the artyclis of oure feith, neuertheles Y trowe that God loues theyme well,” as he did “Iob, whiche was a peynym whom he held for his trewe seruaunt, and many other also” (p. 126). The people of Synophe, Job, and “many other” appear God’s elect. The Synophians are distinguished by their commitment to nakedness and lack of interest in all material goods; Job is a pagan, a purportedly non-Jewish character from the Old Testament; and the “many others” imply endless possibilities. The narrator who once followed the logic of supersession and supremacy here arrives at a startling conclusion: “I trowe that God loueth wel al these that loueth hym and serueth hym . . . as Iob dide” (p. 126). Supersession is cancelled; the Old Testament once again irrupts into the present as a promise of divine benevolence to all peoples. The people of Synophe and Job lead Mandeville to a series of scriptural citations that endorse multiple religions, further unsettling the idea of sin-gular election. The citations begin with “oure lord” speaking “thurgh the mouth of his prophete Ysaye: . . . I schal putte to hem my lawis manyfold”

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(pp. 126–27). Jesus himself, speaking through a Jewish prophet, validates “lawis manyfold,” recalling the Book’s astonishing diversity of religions and suggesting that some, at least, are legitimate. Or, the narrator continues, consider the gospel: “Alias oues habeo que non sunt ex hoc ouili, that is to say, I haue other sheep whiche beth not of this foold [John 10:16]” (p. 127). In Mandeville’s context, the “other sheep” are non-Christian peoples, and Christ at last endorses the universalist theology developed in his absence. Bragmen, neighbors of Cathay, Job, those who love and serve God: all are potentially Christ’s elect. Christianity is not finally a universal religion, except where Christians follow the law of nature and the fundamental rules of faith held by many other peoples. As Mandeville presents it, the New Testament continues the Old in its promise to “all folk.” Mandeville reinforces this radical universalism with Saint Peter’s vision of unclean beasts:

And therto acordith a visioun of seynt Petir that he saugh at Iaffe, how the aungel come fro heuene and brought with hym alle manere of beestis and naddris and fowlis and seide to seynt Petir, Take and ete. And seynt petir an-sueride, I ete neuer of beestis vnclene. And the aungel seide to hym thanne: . . . Clepe thou nought these thingis vnclene which God hath yclensid. This was ydo in tokenyng that men schulde noght haue many men in dispyt for theire dyuerse lawis, for we wote not whom God loueth ne whom he hatith. (p. 127)

Peter adheres to Jewish dietary law, eating nothing “vnclene,” until he learns that God gives “dyuerse lawis” to diverse peoples. Peter confronts the extension of God’s love to gentiles as both a fulfillment of Jewish dietary law (cleanness still matters) and a replacement of the unique law with “dyuerse lawis.” An embodied connection—a hinge—between Juda-ism past and Christianity future, Peter testifies at once to the continuity of the faiths and to the break between them. Much as Mandeville employs the Muslim Sultan to reaffirm Christian election, so he uses the Jewish Peter to authorize Christianity, delivering the validation of Christian faith that can only come from Jews, the original recipients of God’s law and promises. At the same time, Peter’s vision does not restrict election to Christians but opens it to those with “dyuerse lawis, for we wote not whom God loueth ne whom he hatith.” Christianity has lost its exceptional status and become one of many laws acceptable to God. The Book puts European Christianity into a narrative context that relativ-izes it and implicitly denies the presumed superiority of “oure treuthe.” The final stages of the narrator’s journey at once tremendously complicate the relationship between Christianity and Judaism and open hopeful pos-sibilities for conceiving of God’s many chosen peoples. Mandeville does not suggest an awareness of dangers implicit in his radical universalism, though “radical” is perhaps too strong for an attitude found in several later

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fourteenth-century works.43 It is nonetheless a dangerous enough idea for an interpolator to add to the end of the Book a passage in which the pope personally approves the work: “he [the pope] seyde me for certeyn that alle was sooth that was therynne” (p. 136).44 This statement falls short of the unequivocal authorization doubtless intended. “He seyde” reminds us of the many people in the Book who “say” what they believe; elsewhere, the expression limits the authority of the belief, presenting each belief as pertaining to a particular group, not as a universal truth. Mandeville has, moreover, shown that papal claims to authority are either contested or unknown among devout Christians. Rome’s dominance is imperfect, limited in both geographical scope and moral authority. “Sooth,” more-over, can denote factual reality, but it can also signify mere spiritual or moral certainty.45 After encountering so many “sooths,” so many disputed (Christian, papal, other) assertions of religious supremacy, the reader might well take the interpolation with a grain of salt, recognizing that to say a thing is “sooth” does not make it so. Still, to the degree that the statement authorizes the Book’s content, it endorses the idea—drawn from both Old and New Testaments—that God chooses many peoples, includ-ing those who conform to Biblical Judaism.

VI. ENGLAND’S PLACE IN THE WORLD

There is no scholarly virtue in flattening Mandeville’s edgy vernacular theology into anachronistic praise for his tolerance or outrage at his anti-Judaism. Iain Macleod Higgins perceptively summarizes the work’s complicated piety: “charity, prejudice, hatred, piety, and tolerance . . . are perfectly compatible with each other” in this work, as in late medieval culture.46 In its own time, the Book was often read as a devotional work, and we fail at historical empathy if we cannot register the knottiness of its affective piety or apprehend its daring (albeit convoluted) treat-ments of religious difference.47 Early readers may well have valued the

43. Charles Moseley documents several parallel instances of “tolerance” for religious diversity: “Sir John Mandeville’s Visit to the Pope: The Implications of an Interpolation,” Neophilologus, 54 (1970), 79; Spearing compares Mandeville (on the Bragmen) with Julian of Norwich and William Langland, “Journey to Jerusalem,” pp. 12–14; Watson sets Mandev-ille’s universalism in the broader context of vernacular theology, “Visions of Inclusion,” pp. 145–87. 44. Moseley, “Sir John Mandeville’s Visit to the Pope,” 78–79, sets forth this hypothesis. 45. Middle English Dictionary, s.v. soth, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/, accessed June 20, 2012. 46. Higgins, Writing East, p. 81. 47. For the work’s inclusion in devotional compilations, see C. W. R. D. Moseley, “The Metamorphoses of Sir John Mandeville,” Review of English Studies, 4 (1974), 10–13; Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences, pp. 256–58; Yeager, Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative, pp. 129–32.

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work’s ambivalence, as well as its final hopeful messages about a simpler standard of faith than pertained in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europe. Mandeville’s ability to represent a complexly affective religion, to capture an experience of anxiety and ambivalent affinity, may have helped in the first centuries of reception to make the Book popular with devout readers who recognized themselves—their doubts as well as their hopes—in some of the narrator’s rapidly-changing attitudes toward Jews and others. Within the narrative’s conceptual boundaries, ambivalence toward Jews appears inescapable and irresolvable. Identification with Jews leads narratively to denials of sameness and construction of the Jew as Other, repression of Christian dependence on Judaism, and, inevita-bly, the return of the repressed. Supersession structured an irreducible tension into medieval Christian perceptions of Judaism, the origin that Mandeville at one point denies, at another makes the ground of true, universal faiths. In this narrative, the theory of supersession helps ex-plain the struggle for supremacy theoretically possessed but never fully owned, the relation to a promised land that Christians inherit but from which they have been disinherited. By the work’s end, however, supersession has been superseded. As Man-deville travels further east, Christian-Jewish relations grow increasingly unstable, unmoored from a coherent supersessionary model, and sugges-tive at best of divine inscrutability. Difficulties about religious difference are not, of course, limited to representations of Jews. In the course of the narrative, Mandeville juxtaposes so many versions of particular religious truths—in diverse Christian sects; Judaism; Islam; nameless religions in which people eat their children, bleed, or go naked in honor of their deity; religions wherein a God of nature is worshipped—that he fosters a religious relativism that challenges conventional European pieties. Sarah Salih cogently concludes that the Book is “potentially deeply subversive of the accepted truths of Latin Catholicism . . . and culturally [I would add: religiously] relativist.”48 If Christians are a chosen people, and if England is heir to the promised land, they are obviously not the only chosen peoples, not the only heirs to divine beneficence, nor even the most favored among many heirs. The Book opens with a particularized truth, an English knight’s claim to know God’s will, but then sets that assertion against many similar avowals. In the end, the English truth is only one in a sequence of reported beliefs. Mandeville creates a narrative in which “our” truth and “their”

48. “Idols and Simulacra: Hybridity and Representation in Mandeville’s Travels,” in The Monstrous Middle Ages, ed. Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2003), p. 128, with discussion at pp. 113–33.

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truth are possibly both true, and not necessarily mutually exclusive. God has diverse laws of which, it seems, we know nothing. Mandeville traces a path for the reader that begins with certainty that Judaism has been superseded, and ends with praise for universally inclusive Old Testament religions. The supersessionary logic with which Mandeville begins the Book proves inadequate to the task of representing a fragmented Christendom in rela-tion to a pervasively influential Jewish scripture. The theory of superses-sion, after all, requires a single historical turning point—the incarnation of Christ—not a sequence of contested originary moments situated in Rome, Constantinople, the land of Prester John, and so on. Mandeville’s imaginative survey of world religions ultimately reveals supersession to be provincially Eurocentric. The theory does not—and cannot—explain relations between the existing multitude of Christian sects and their many near-Others, from Muslims to Bragmen. The journey east therefore aban-dons a supersessionary historical paradigm in order to explore nonbinary models of divine election, in order to plumb the implications of Biblical texts that promise salvation to “all folk” in “all the world.” As the narrative progresses, the supposed priority of the Roman Church turns into an il-lusion. Mandeville’s survey of the world situates within Christian chivalric culture—the knight at home in St. Albans, England—an awareness not only of contemporary dissent from dominant truths, but of other possible truths. Although this may sound to modern readers like a form of toler-ance, we might better apprehend it as an acceptance of divine mystery, a willingness to admit epistemological uncertainty about God’s purposes. Mandeville does not claim the power to allow for—to tolerate—Others; he claims a lesser authority, that of believing in his God’s capacity for toler-ance, including his acceptance of those who adhere to the Old Testament and know nothing of the New. Several scholars in recent years have turned to the theory of Oriental-ism to read Mandeville in terms of “imaginative acts of cultural domina-tion,” wherein a European system of knowledge enables the consumption and mastery of the Other.49 Yet none of Mandeville’s western institutions, including the Church, comes close to a knowledge that imaginatively dominates the east, nor is there a military-state power sufficient to exercise authority over any part of the east, two basic principles of Edward W. Said’s

49. Heng, Empire of Magic, p. 242, with discussion of Mandeville at pp. 239–305. See also Andrew Fleck on hegemonic western Christianity, “Here, There, and In Between: Repre-senting Difference in the Travels of Sir John Mandeville,” Studies in Philology, 97 (2000), 379–400; and krummel on Mandeville’s colonizing translation of otherness into sameness, Crafting Jewishness, pp. 73–74.

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Orientalism.50 To be sure, Said argues that an essentialist knowledge-power conjunction characterizes western representations of the east, beginning with the Iliad and encompassing the entirety of western European history.51 He generalizes easily across centuries and cultures: “[T]he European representation of the Muslim . . . was always a way of controlling the re-doubtable Orient”; “the Oriental was always like some aspect of the West”; orientalism was “the common possession of all who have thought about the Orient in the West”; the “Orient and Islam are always represented as outsiders” (pp. 60, 67, 69, 71; my emphases). Such generalizations are properly understood as polemical rhetorical positions rather than as a compelling scholarly history. Mandeville’s Book strongly resists the “always” of Said’s theory, the idea of an unchanging history projected backwards from the colonial era.52 Mandeville does not represent a hegemonic western Church, or, for that matter, a unified Christianity; and he certainly does not picture a Christen-dom able to exert overwhelming military power in the east. Although the western Church seeks to authorize “oure treuthe,” that is precisely what the narrative reveals to be challenged. Rather than allowing Orientalism to determine what kind of cultural work the medieval text is doing (advanc-ing western hegemony, colonizing the Other), we might better use the medieval work to demonstrate the limits of modern theory: the existence of a historical moment at which western hegemony was not the norm (was, indeed, probably unimaginable), a moment at which European losses in the Crusades raised uncomfortable questions about Eurocentric truths and traditional pieties. In Mandeville’s time, these questions surfaced in theological works written by and for the laity, and he is not alone in assert-ing a vernacular theology that owes little to institutional power structures. Pace Said, presumptuous “clerical” claims to knowledge and power, and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century alignment of knowledge with power, are not essential western attributes, but historically contingent developments, doubtless motivated at least in part by the theological and epistemological uncertainties of the later Middle Ages. Mandeville’s ver-nacular theology was potentially controversial in his time; it certainly set

50. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), pp. 31–110. 51. Said, Orientalism, pp. 49–73. Paradoxically, Said’s Orientalism is also new to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century imperialism. 52. Braude, “Mandeville’s Jews,” pp. 134–35, develops an insightful critique of Said on the grounds of Mandeville’s treatment of Muslims, which I would agree is far from orientalizing. See also Akbari’s well-nuanced delineation of a medieval Orientalism distinct from (if also continuous with) Said’s Orientalism: Idols in the East, pp. 5–19; and compare her argument that Orientalism as geographic divide between east and west was invented in the fourteenth century, “From Due East to True North: Orientalism and Orientation,” The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Cohen, pp. 19–34.

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forth extremely interesting possibilities for understanding the Biblical support for universalism. His Book fits within an array of similarly adven-turous theological works composed in later fourteenth-century England, ranging from Cleanness to Pearl, Piers Plowman, Julian of Norwich’s Revela-tion of Love, and The Canterbury Tales. Although not as elegant as some of these writers, or as well-recognized as a theologian, Mandeville merits a prominent place in their company for his encyclopedic, contradictory, and revisionary treatments of Judaism—as well as for his confident uses of Scripture to support his ideas.

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