How far from Jerusalem? Tropical customs and the question of race in the Book of John Mandeville

The Book of John Mandeville, while ostensibly a pilgrimage guide documenting an English knight’s journey into the East, is an ideal text in which to study the developing concept of race in the European Middle Ages. The Mandeville-author’s sense of place and morality are inextricably linked to each other: Jerusalem is the center of his world, which necessarily forces Africa and Asia to occupy the spiritual periphery. Most inhabitants of Mandeville’s landscapes are not monsters in the physical sense, but at once startlingly human and irreconcilably alien in their customs. Their religious heresies, disordered sexual appetites, and monstrous acts of cannibalism label them as fallen state of the European Christian self. Mandeville’s monstrosities lie not in the fantastical, but the disturbingly familiar, coupling recognizable humans with a miscarriage of natural law. In using real people to illustrate the moral degeneracy of the tropics, Mandeville’s ethnography helps shed light on the missing link between medieval monsters and modern race theory.

Investigating the Death of the Early Paleozoic Moyero River Geomagnetic Superchron: Middle Ordovician Paleomagnetism from Estonia

Flat-lying Early and Middle Ordovician limestones exposed on the North margin of Estonia provide key insights into the early Paleozoic biosphere and climatic history of the Baltic Platform, and potentially offer a site for calibrating the duration of the proposed Moyero River Reversed Superchron. Past paleomagnetic analyses on these rocks have been focused primarily on determining paleomagnetic pole positions and have been hampered by relatively weak remanent magnetizations. We therefore applied techniques of the Rock and Paleomagnetic Instrument Development (RAPID) consortium using thin-walled, low-noise quartz glass sample holders on an automatic system to enhance magnetostratigraphic resolution. Our results, based on over 300 oriented core samples spanning the stratigraphic interval from the Volkhov stage, up through the Lasnamägi stage, confirm previous work isolating a stable characteristic magnetization of reversed polarity, and furthermore confirm the presence of an interval of magnetically Reversed polarity spanning an interval of at least 15 million year duration. In addition, we recognize a magnetic overprint of presumed Normal polarity held in antiferromagnetic phases, of presumed Permian age, based on the apparent polar wander path given by (Plado et al., 2010).