How Medieval Thinkers Analysed Cultural Differences

Medieval intellectuals were fascinated to compare their culture with others, often, though not always, looking at differences in religion. They did so using a number of different genres, among them dialogues between representatives of different ’laws’ (i.e., religions), travellers’ stories, geographies, philosophical treatises and ethnographic reports.

The main focus will be on the twelfth to fourteenth centuries and on Western European Christian writers, including Peter Abelard, Ramon Llull, William of Rubruk, John of Piano Carpini, Gerald of Wales, Marco Polo and Roger Bacon. But it will also discuss some Jewish writers, such as Judah Halevi and Maimonides, and some Islamic ones such as Ibn Fadlan and al-Idrisi.

Historians have greatly underestimated the sophistication and variety of this facet of medieval intellectual life, because it does not fall neatly into one of our current subject divisions (such as history of philosophy or history of literature) and because anthropology and comparative religion are usually presumed to be modern disciplines, without medieval precedents. The aim of this book is to show that there existed a medieval ancestor to these disciplines, in which the similar questions to those that interest specialists today were discussed, but within a different context and with different aims. By studying a series of outstanding texts in this field, the study thus aims to establish Cultural Comparisons as an independent branch of medieval studies.

John Marenbon is a Senior Research Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He has written extensively on medieval philosophy.