The Medieval ‘Book Of Marvels’ Is The Ultimate Guide To Our Crazy World

The medieval world was filled with wonders. In India, there lived a people nourished by the scent of flowers. In Spain, mares were impregnated by the summer breeze. In Sri Lanka, people dwelt inside the shells of giant snails. And Ethiopia was a land of dragons, basilisks, and men without heads, having instead mouth and eyes spread across their chests.

These astonishing phenomena were reported in The Book of Marvels, an encyclopedic guide to every culture and continent as understood by scholars living in fifteenth century Europe. Essential reading for aristocrats, handmade copies were embellished with illustrations that appeared to corroborate the text.

Although the book might have misled explorers and horse breeders, the combination of fanciful language and pictures facilitated armchair travel and reoriented the Christian imagination. A new exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum presents two surviving copies of the Marvels – one from its own collection and the other from the Morgan Library – offering contemporary audiences the rare opportunity to look at the world from a Medieval point of view. (The exhibition will travel to the Morgan next winter.)

The curators take pains to identify the prejudices promulgated by the Marvels and other books of the era. As explained in a Note to the Reader prefacing the exhibition catalogue, the text and images sometimes “demean religions, peoples, and customs, enabling the reader-viewers of the day to perceive them as not only different but also inferior.” Observing that the manuscripts “actively disseminated stereotypes of the kind that that stoke the fires of prejudice to this day,” they contend that the Marvels “serves as an important lesson on how the implicit biases of language and imagery play a formative role in defining and reinforcing social norms.”

There is plenty to support the curators’ position and to justify their concerns. The Ethiopian people are especially belittled, partly because of Christian hostility toward other religions and partly because Ethiopia was a synecdoche for terra incognita. In addition to the basilisks and dragons and headless ‘Blemmyes’, the Marvels describes men with horns and cloven hooves, women with tusks and ox tails, and the tradition of electing a dog to serve as the nation’s monarch. Strange beings and heathen ways also loom large in India, though scorn is mingled with lust, as befits a place that medieval Europeans yearned to possess. (We’re told that Indian idols are forged in silver and gold, and huge women, “all naked”, force men “to have carnal company with them”.)

As peculiar as these details may be, the rhetoric is uncannily familiar. Six centuries after the Marvels was inscribed on parchment, the act of othering is surging with the rising popularity of rightwing factions in the United States and Europe. Xenophobia is a source of power. Strategies deployed by the Marvels may not be made for TV, but their relative simplicity is instructive, revealing how othering works to this day – and showing how persistently effective they’ve been.

As the Morgan curator Joshua O’Driscoll explains in his catalogue essay, the methodology of the Marvels dates back to ancient Rome, enlisting the principles of contrast and antithesis used by the encyclopedist Pliny the Elder. Pliny’s Natural History – which is cited often in the Marvels as an authority – presents the diversity of humanity in terms of deviation from a standard that is unspecified but implicitly Roman. For instance, the Blemmyes are characterized as headless; they are lacking in an attribute that is assumed to be normal. “Pliny set an important precedent for medieval approaches to ethnography,” O’Driscoll writes. Books including the Marvels “focused on the most distinctive examples of human diversity as a way of defining – by contrast – expected norms of appearance and behavior.”

As a consequence, the other is doubly estranged: not only set outside the civilized world but also exploited as an irregularity against which to reinforce the bulwark of society. Subjects of xenophobia are isolated, and intolerance is reified. Civilization is standardized. Any dissent is threatened with ostracism.

But should we merely other the Marvels and its unknown author? Should we merely vilify the book as propaganda to advance the bigoted cause of “white, elite, heteronormative, able-bodied, cisgendered Christian Europeans” (to quote from the catalogue’s Note to the Reader)? Should we merely condemn the Marvels for encouraging colonialism and slavery? Although there is much to censure, and much to be learned about the stratagems of hatred and how to deter them, the Marvels is multifaceted, as were the motivations of the people who created it.

In medieval times, marvels were defined as phenomena that are “beyond our comprehension, even though they are natural”. This definition, written by the English scholar Gervase of Tilbury sometime in the late 12^th or early 13^th century, distinguished marvels from miracles, which were “preternatural” and ascribed to divine power. As a result, contemplating earthly marvels was fundamentally unlike marveling at heavenly miracles. Marvels encouraged awe in the here-and-now: humble appreciation of God’s great creation.

From this vantage, Blemmyes and canine kings are marks of divine creativity, and must be holy even if they’re norm breaking. In fact, the idea that marvels are beyond comprehension turns each peculiarity into a reminder that our judgment ought to be suspended. Marvels challenge people to expand the range of tolerance.

The Book of Marvels is notable for its omission of moralizing commentary. In contrast to earlier encyclopedic works such as Pierre Bersuire’s 14^th century Moral Reduction, the Marvels presents only descriptions and illustrations. In its time, it was the closest approximation of firsthand experience, almost entirely open to interpretation. Without question, many medieval readers would have taken it as evidence of their moral superiority, and as enticement to oppress and exploit Ethiopians and Indians and Sri Lankans. But other readings were also likely, and likely would have had the opposite effect.

We still live in a world of prejudice, but it is a world in which marvels have become vanishingly scarce. They have been replaced by facts, some verifiable, others “alternative”. Everybody knows everything, or so they’re led to believe. As a consequence, the other is either assimilated or alienated, denied otherness or denied humanity.

It may seem paradoxical that a century defined by advances in technology and science would be so strongly polarized, that people’s worldviews would be so stubbornly incompatible. Immersion in the Marvels provides an explanation. People today are victims of their own certainty, convinced that nothing lies beyond their comprehension.

We need not be nostalgic (or religious or gullible) to benefit from the Book of Marvels. For all that is known about the world, there remains plenty to wonder at, and ample cause for humility. Journeying through the Marvels is good preparation to travel through life with openness to otherness as another way of being.