Prester John legend shaped how Europeans interpreted all foreign evidence for 300 years
Evidence
The legend transmuted the world beyond Europe, “the Indies,” into Eurocentric terms. Whatever was the reality of those lands and their peoples, came to be less and less important. For the next 300 years, between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries, the legend of Prester John provided Europe’s scholars and their less learned coreligionists with a structured and obfuse prism through which the authenticity of every datum, every traveler’s report, every intelligence of its foreign trade, every fable of its poets, and every phatic foible of its soldiery would be screened and strained. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 516
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s orientalism concept about how frames of reference precede and filter empirical knowledge.