The Worlding of Marco Polo

Sharon Kinoshita
Literature
UC Santa Cruz

“The Worlding of Marco Polo” comprises an annotated translation of Paris BNF fr. 1116 (c. 1310), one of the earliest surviving manuscripts of Marco Polo’s so-called Travels (1298), and a monograph resituating it in its original thirteenth-century context. While few medieval figures are of such abiding interest as Marco Polo, few have been so prone to misinterpretation. Originally entitled Le Devisement du monde (Description of the World), his text is regularly contrued as a travel narrative—a category mistake that holds the author to anachronistic standards of eyewitness authenticity, and aligns the book with texts such as pilgrims’ narratives or Columbus’s diaries, rather than more apposite congeners contemporary genres such as Arabic geographies, Italian merchant manuals, world chronicles, miracle stories, etc. This project offers a synchronic analysis of Marco’s world and text, combining my expertise in medieval literature with secondary research in the histories of Europe, Asia, and the Indian Ocean.