사악한 풍습과 성유물: 식인으로 읽는 맨더빌의 세계

Abstract

Using cannibalism as a critical lens, this article reexamines the West and East imagined by John Mandeville. The Christian veneration of holy relics depicted in the earlier part of the text overlaps uncannily with the part-real, part-imaginary Oriental practices of cannibalism described later. As a result, the boundary between Christianity and paganism, civilization and barbarism, self and other, is destabilized and critically reconfigured within Mandeville’s hybrid and fluid romance geography. Mandeville’s Travels offers a uniquely medieval critique of Western Christian culture and religious imagination—one that is at once more inclusive and less teleological than Montaigne’s better-known early modern meditation on cannibalism.