Rediscovering Marco Polo

Few medieval figures enjoy greater name recognition than Marco Polo. Today, he is a brand whose name connotes exoticism, adventure, and East-West travel; academic critics sometime see him as the precursor to European explorers who cast a colonizing gaze over non-Western parts of the world. The source of all these images is the book usually known in English translation as “The Travels.” In this talk, I return his work to its original title, The Description of the World (in Old French, Le Devisement du monde). Composed by the Venetian merchant in collaboration with an Arthurian romance writer named Rustichello of Pisa in 1298, The Description comes at the midpoint of a remarkable century when the Mongol conquests of Chinggis Khan and his successors, resulting in the largest contiguous empire in history, had produced a world of unprecedented travel, communication, and interaction. Our Slugs & Steins lecture will explore some of the most interesting, curious, and surprising aspects of that world.