The Image of the Greek: Western Pilgrims' Views of Eastern Monks and Monasteries in the Holy Land, c.1200–1500

• Published in: Speculum 2019-07, Vol.94 (3), p.674-703
• Main Author: Jotischky, Andrew
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 13th century; 14th century; 15th century; Holy places; Medieval period; Monasteries; Monks; Pilgrimages; Religious literature; Twain, Mark (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835-1910)
• ISSN: 0038-7134; 2040-8072
• DOI: 10.1086/703543

Mark Twain was certainly not the first nineteenth-century Western traveler to be struck by the image of the Eastern monk, nor what that image was taken to represent. Twain's descriptions, which can be matched by others, also find visual expression in the evocations of the ruins and their contemporary inhabitants by David Roberts, Edward Lear, and other artists.4 While they form a distinctive part of the orientalist tone of nineteenth-century travelwriting, they can also be seen as part of a longer tradition of Western interest in the image of the Eastern religious. In what follows, this interest will be explored through the Holy Land pilgrimage literature of the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. I examine descriptions of Orthodox monks—mostly Greek—in the wider context of knowledge and understanding of Orthodox monasticism in the period when Europeans came increasingly into contact with them; I discuss the reasons for increased European interest in visiting Orthodox monasteries—especially St. Katherine’s on Mount Sinai—and finally argue that this interest should be understood in light of growing concerns with tracing the origins of monasticism itself.