Reports by medieval western missionaries: questions of genre

In the 13th century, the striving for spreading Christendom and sacralising pagan space, a typical feature of the medieval mentality, was channelled into the concrete form of missionary journeys to the East, which were a direct result of the strengthening and expanding Mongol-Tatar presence. At the First Council of Lyon in 1245, Pope Innocent IV called for Christianizing the Islamic world, opening the way to regular missionary journeys to Asia. Four missionary groups embarked to the Golden Horde. Upon their return, the monastic missionaries drafted reports for the spiritual or lay authorities that sent them on their journeys to fulfil specific tasks. This paper examines the genre characteristics of these “utilitarian” reports that stood outside or, at best, at the periphery of the space of fiction. However, their authors belonged to a cultural context that included different fictional, religious, and scholarly genres. We consider the most striking reports - “History of the Mongols, Which We Call Tartars” (“Historia Mongalorum quod nos tatrarus appellamus”) by Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, “Journey to the Eastern Parts” (“Itinerarium ad partes Orientalis”) by William of Rubruck and “Report of Miracles among the Eastern Tatars” (“Relatio de mirabilibus orientalium Tartarorum”) by Odoric of Pordenone - and analyze their genre characteristics. We conclude that reports by Western missionaries may be considered to be a separate genre of medieval literature, which combines elements from different fictional and non-fictional categories: travelogues, descriptions of lands, ethnographic accounts, mirabilia, and sermons. This was a unique synthesis of highly disparate genres, some of which had never come into contact before. The missionary reports are also interesting insofar as they violate the general interdependence of medieval literary genres that has been noted by scholars: medieval genres existed not in their own right but in the context of individual literary movements (chivalric, religious, etc.), where they freely mutated between themselves, creating genre complexes, while the boundaries between the movements remained fairly strict. In the case of missionary reports, we see hybrid genre agglomerations, in which different literary movements combine. This apparently stems from the “non-fictional” nature of these reports, on the one hand, and the medieval striving for encyclopedism (particularly clear in the genre of the summa), on the other. Each of the analyzed genres has been studied to a greater or lesser extent by scholars, while missionary reports have not been examined from the genre standpoint. This paper may be considered a first attempt at investigating this problem.