Race

Abstract

Medieval travel literature, judging the peoples of distant lands sometimes positively, sometimes negatively, and occasionally neutrally, tends to characterize whole groups on the basis of a limited number of traits. The alien collective, rather than individual natives, is generally the preferred focus of description. Any quality or trait, rumored or verified, is liable to correlation with the totalizing ethnic portrait: physical attributes; ethical and moral tendencies; shared propensities and typical behaviors; rituals and folk traditions; noteworthy events or personages of tribal or community history—these are typical elements in the composition of medieval travel literature’s racial profiles. Sometimes in the form of brief thumbnails, at other times variously expanded, such profiles may either express preconceived stereotypes or convey more idiosyncratic opinions. In either case, the focus generally remains on the typical and the general, rather than on the individual and the specific.