It was a gray, rainy day when I visited The Book of Marvels: Imagining the Medieval World at the Morgan Library & Museum. Soon, I was jostling fellow museum-goers in the small room to glimpse the vast reaches of time and space that lay within the show’s manuscripts, far away from the dreary world outside.
The exhibition focuses on a 15th-century global guide called the Book of Marvels of the World, by an unknown French author. The Morgan brings together two of the four known copies, plus other medieval European materials that envision non-European cultures (as well as two Persian manuscripts). The book was meant as a quasi-ethnographic guide to the wonders of the world, presenting 56 locations through an array of curiosities and stereotypes that would instill both excitement and fear in the (specifically White and Christian) medieval European reader.
Manuscripts in cases are open to illustrated pages, accompanied by brief explanations, but when I was there, the pictures seemed to compel the audience (myself included) more than the information. A colorful woodcut print in Konrad von Megenberg’s The Book of Nature (published 1475), from Germany, depicts peoples “from the East” with multiple arms and heads, as well as the “dog-headed Cynocephali” and the “headless Blemmyes.”
“Pregnancy Ritual,” an illustration and description in Natural History of the Indies (c. 1586), is more naturalistic and indicates a transition from tall tales of exotic locales to extractive colonial expansion. An image of brown-skinned people in front of an ochre straw hut is particularly striking for its nuanced color and dynamic patterning. It is accompanied by a didactic that explains the 16th-century text’s focus on the Caribbean’s natural resources to justify European expeditions there.
The Book of Marvels is an example of the kind of show that’s hard to avoid at United States archival art institutions like the Morgan, wherein problematic historical content, aesthetic appeal, and fantasy all intersect. Didactics like the one for “Pregnancy Ritual,” along with an introductory mention of European biases that enabled colonialism and racially motivated violence, and a disclaimer about potentially offensive material, acknowledge the destructive seeds these materials sowed.
At the same time, The Book of Marvels is a chance for museum-goers to marvel at both the beauty of the manuscripts and the appeal of travelogues that promise adventure and an escape from the everyday, whether in the 15th century or the 21st. What I’d like to see are the travelogues that mythologize the oddities of the medieval European. I’m sure that someone outside of Europe in the Middle Ages imagined a dog-headed Cynocephali living somewhere in France.
The Book of Marvels: Imagining the Medieval World continues at the Morgan Library & Museum (225 Madison Avenue, Murray Hill, Manhattan) through May 25. The exhibition was curated by Joshua O’Driscoll.