| Before Orientalism: Asian Peoples and Cultures in European Travel Writing, 1245-1510 Subjects: Travel Medieval -- Asia -- History -- Sources; Travelers’ writings European -- History and criticism; Asia -- Description and travel -- Early works to 1800; Asia -- Foreign public opinion Western -- History; Drawing on medieval accounts of the earliest European journeys to China, India, Mongolia, and southeast Asia, Before Orientalism explores European attitudes toward Asian eating habits, sexual practices, femininities, and civility, reconstructing a precolonial vision of the East that was often neutral or admiring. Kim M. Phillips is Associate Professor of History at the University of Auckland. She is coauthor (with Barry Reay) of Sex Before Sexuality: A Premodern History and author of Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England, 1270-1540. |