earticle

영어

The so-called 'Pax Mongolica' led to a very dynamic period in which the West and the East encountered and communicated substantially. Considering a series of contemporary Travels to the East such as those of Plano di Carpini, Guillaume de Rubrouck, Marco Polo and Odorico da Pordenone, this article aims to shed new light on several novelties of Mandeville's Travels. First of all, from a viewpoint of fact and fiction, this article focuses on conventional and new aspects appeared in Mandeville's text. If the author filled his text with so many marvels, it might be not only because they were interesting, but also because they satisfied the expectation of his readers. In this sense, the strangeness of the East was a familiar strangeness, as Mary B. Campbell has noted. Furthermore, the author's tactics were to put most of these marvels into the barbarous and unknown space from many islands around India to Southern China called Manzi on the one hand, and to make the strange objects familiar and understandable by describing them in detail on the other. Mandeville's Travels is also outstanding in its attitudes towards the Others. The author's conventional appeal to the Crusades was overshadowed by his tolerant and relativistic attitudes towards different customs and cultures of Islam and the East, and his idea that the morals of many heathen societies were compatible with the Christian creeds. Moreover, the encounter with the East by means of his reading and imagining served for him as a path to self-reflection and self-criticism by projecting the realities of Christendom onto the outside world with religious and cultural diversity. It is by such intention that he chose certain topics out of so many information regarding the East and transformed them in a particular way. In a word, his travel towards the Others was the travel towards the Self.