Eloise McEvoy

Project title:  

Historia Orientalis, Condicionibus Orientalium. Or Liber de Mirabilibus. Geographical knowledge and travel in fourteenth-century English multiple-text manuscripts

Project Summary:  

This project is a comparative study of the extant manuscripts, with an origin in England, of Jacques de Vitry’s Historia Orientalis, and the Latin translation of Marco Polo’s Devisement (De consuetudinibus et condicionibus orientalium regionum). Both texts have a long list of associated genres, and labels attached by scholars; Vitry’s Historia is described by Jessalyn Bird as ‘osmotic’ of genre, and the Devisement described by Simon Gaunt as ‘haunted by other modes of writing’. The two texts have very similar manuscript traditions, and together they can assist in an understanding of the hybridity of ‘geographical’ writing, the interaction between temporal and spatial knowledge, and the extent to which knowledge generated by travel was recognised as such.

This is a codicological study, and a study of intertextuality. It will involve attention to ideas of a canon and an interrogation of miscellaneity through patterns of textual companions, the presentation of these texts, their meta-text, and a consideration of authorship and authority. The centring of emic nomenclature, and the question of genre is of particular importance in our digital age.

Scholarship on Jacques’ Historia remains largely within the realm of crusade literature, and the English reception of Francesco Pipino’s translation of Marco Polo has not been treated in full. These are two texts that have distinct forms, content, and provenances, but seem to converge in the English tradition as ‘books of marvels’. I aim to contribute to conversations surrounding the relationship between history and geography writing, ‘travel literature’ and genre, and the pervasiveness of spatial knowledge within the medieval knowledge order.