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.

A distinct European perspective on Asia emerged in the late Middle Ages. Early reports of a homogeneous "India" of marvels and monsters gave way to accounts written by medieval travelers that indulged readers' curiosity about far-flung landscapes and cultures without exhibiting the attitudes evident in the later writings of aspiring imperialists. Mining the accounts of more than twenty Europeans who made—or claimed to have made—journeys to Mongolia, China, India, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia between the mid-thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Kim Phillips reconstructs a medieval European vision of Asia that was by turns critical, neutral, and admiring.
In offering a cultural history of the encounter between medieval Latin Christians and the distant East, Before Orientalism reveals how Europeans' prevailing preoccupations with food and eating habits, gender roles, sexualities, civility, and the foreign body helped shape their perceptions of Asian peoples and societies. Phillips gives particular attention to the texts' known or likely audiences, the cultural settings within which they found a foothold, and the broader impact of their descriptions, while also considering the motivations of their writers. She reveals in rich detail responses from European travelers that ranged from pragmatism to wonder. Fear of military might, admiration for high standards of civic life and court culture, and even delight in foreign magnificence rarely assumed the kind of secular Eurocentric superiority that would later characterize Orientalism. Placing medieval writing on the East in the context of an emergent "Europe" whose explorers sought to learn more than to rule, Before Orientalism complicates our understanding of medieval attitudes toward the foreign.

"A richly detailed discussion of later medieval European travellers' accounts describing Eastern Asia. . . . Phillips's call for a 'precolonial studies,' in which the diversity of European responses to foreignness takes centre-stage, is a compelling point from which medieval and early modern historians might begin to question the historical specificity of language of conquest, ownership and desire outlined so influentially by Edward Said." - English Historical Review

"Well-argued and well-researched." - Speculum

"A detailed and stimulating portrait of the heterogeneity of Western travelers' responses to what they saw, heard, tasted, touched, and smelled during their journeys to the distant regions of Asia." - Suzanne Conklin Akbari, University of Toronto

"Before Orientalism argues that medieval travelers were not and could not have been writing from an imperialist perspective as later 'Orientalist' writers are alleged to have done. Kim M. Phillips proves her case most convincingly, and following these travel writers through her examination of their texts is an exceedingly interesting journey." - David O. Morgan, University of Wisconsin-Madison