Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100-1450.
- Author/Editor
- Akbari, Suzanne Conklin.
- Title
- Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100-1450.
- Published
- Akbari, Suzanne Conklin. Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100-1450 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2009), pp. 46-48.
- Review
- Akbari summarizes her book as follows: "'Idols in the East' explores the continuities linking medieval and modern discourses concerning Islam and the Orient in order to unearth the roots of modern Orientalism, and to examine the categories, hierarchies, and symbolic systems that were used to differentiate the Western self from its Eastern other" (1). In chapter 1--"The Shape of the World"--Akbari traces the paradigm shift that started in the twelfth century and culminated in the fourteenth century in which the properties of heat and cold, traditionally associated with the south and the north respectively, were transferred to the east and the west. This resulted in "the production of a binary opposition of East and West, the first a torrid climate populated by irascible people having weak, swarthy bodies, the second a cool climate populated by rational people having strong, fair bodies" (15). Akbari draws attention to Gower's brief descriptive geography in Book VII of CA, which is "after the forme of Mappemounde" (VII, 530). Even though Akbari does not dwell long on Gower she describes Gower's "Mappemounde" as an "extraordinary recasting" of "mappa mundi" conventions (47). She notes that Gower follows the conventional tripartite division of Asia, Europe, and Africa, in which Asia is the largest continent and is "defined in terms of the sun" but that he also unusually defines Asia as "coterminous with the Orient itself" ("Of Orient in general / Withinne his bounde Asie hath al," VII, 554-55). Akbari further states that Gower follows "Augustine, Isidore, Hrabanus Maurus, Vincent of Beauvais, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus" in the division of the tripartite world into two parts: "Orient and Occident, occupied by Asia, on the one side, and Europe and Africa on the other" (47). Commenting how "this two-part division of East and West is in tension with the competing binary opposition of frigid north and torrid south," she demonstrates how Gower invokes the two-part division of the world into east and west and positions the west as aligned with cold and the east with "overwhelming heat, understood in both a literal and a moral sense" (48): "In occident as for the chele, / in orient as for the hete" (VII, 582-83). Akbari concludes by placing Gower in a collection of "certain medieval texts [and authors]," like Bartholomaeus Anglicus and Chaucer, that participate "in the construction of a cold, dispassionate, northerly Occident" (48). [TZ. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2]
- Date
- 2009
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis