Date/Time
Date(s) - 15 Oct 2014
5:30 PM - 6:45 PM
Location
Columbia University Faculty House
Category(ies) No Categories
Wednesday, October 15, 5:30pm: Mark Cruse (Arizona State University) on “Marco Polo’s ‘Portrait’: Illumination and Agency in manuscripts of the Devisement du monde”
The nineteen Old French manuscripts of Marco Polo’s travel account (Le Devisement du monde [The Description of the World]) represent one of the oldest traditions of the text and offer unique insight into its transmission and meaning in the late Middle Ages. Of particular interest are the ways in which these manuscripts depict the protean figure of Polo himself, whose claims about his experiences and about the wider world challenged the most basic assumptions of his early readers. This talk examines the illuminated “portraits” of Marco Polo as first-degree interpretations that draw both on the text, and on broader notions of authorship and textual authority. For illuminators as for other readers, the narratorial voice, or voices, in Polo’s account raised complex questions about his identity and his text’s purpose. At times Polo is a first-person narrator, at others a third-person protagonist. In the course of his account, Polo ranges from author, courtier, explorer and knight to merchant, prisoner, and sage. As the Old French corpus demonstrates, this variability precluded the development of a stock image of Polo, but led instead to different portrayals that reflect different readings of his account. A study of these images allows us to see Polo’s text through the eyes of these early readers and to recapture something of the text’s unsettling strangeness.
All the meetings will begin at 5:30 pm in Faculty House, Columbia University. To reserve a place for dinner at 7 pm (also in Faculty House, buffet at a fixed price of $25), write no less than a week in advance to the rapporteur, Jeffrey Wayno, [email protected]