India is not like previous lands that Sir John Mandeville has traveled to in previous chapter. This is a whole new world, it seems, for Mandeville and we can tell this through his tone and use of language. He seems very neutral throughout writing this and quite observational rather than opinionated. He notes a variety of different things throughout the journey, as this is such a new place for him. He gives a brief overview of the land and terrain. The first thing to note about this aspect is that he thinks India is much larger than what it actually was or even is today. He actually thinks that India is made up of \u201cmore than five thousand different islands.\u201d (74)<\/p>\n
Throughout reading Mandeville, I\u2019ve noticed that he goes on strange stream-of-consciousness tangents (much like I do in these blog posts). For example, while he is described where India is situated in terms of other places he has been to, he goes on about how there are diamonds in this land and how they don\u2019t compare to some of the other diamonds he has come across in Asia. He talks about how they are unbreakable how they have some kind of special courage giving powers (73). These are facts that I don\u2019t think have any deeper meaning, but they struck me in a way that I could not ignore, so they are now included in this blog post.<\/p>\n
When talking about the people in India, he is extremely condescending. The first sentence that even mentions people is this, \u201cThe people living near that river have a foul yellow-and-green complexion.\u201d It doesn\u2019t take much analytical interpretation to see that he is pretty grossed out by these people because they do not look like him, an \u201cintellectual\u201d and \u201ccivilized\u201d man, or shall we say, \u201cwhite.\u201d There is an interesting part where he contradicts my earlier argument where I say that he is very condescending towards the people of India. He talks about the peoples\u2019 different styles of religion. In this sense, he seems a bit understanding of how they worship. He wants to make clear that there is a difference between an idol and an effigy. Obviously in Christianity, the worship of anything other than God himself is idolatry and strictly intolerable. So why make the distinction between an effigy and an idol if he didn\u2019t actually understand where they were coming from? \u201cThey say they know full well these effigies are not God, who made all things; but they are godly because of the miracles that they perform, and therefore they worship them.\u201d (75) On some level, although he does not believe in the things that they do, he connects with them on this mere technicality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
India is not like previous lands that Sir John Mandeville has traveled to in previous chapter. This is a whole new world, it seems, for Mandeville and we can tell this through his tone and use of language. He seems very neutral throughout writing this and quite observational rather than opinionated. He notes a variety […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3892,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[143615],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-john-mandeville","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-the-middle-ages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-the-middle-ages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-the-middle-ages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-the-middle-ages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3892"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-the-middle-ages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=683"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-the-middle-ages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-the-middle-ages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-the-middle-ages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-the-middle-ages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}