To complete research for and write a monograph entitled 'The Indies and the Medieval West: Thought, Report, Imagination' (Turnhout: Brepols, due 2012)

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When Vasco da Gama's ships, the first to take the sea route from Portugal to India, arrived in 1497 in Calicut on the South-West coast of India, a member of his crew is famously said to have explained the mission as a quest for 'Christians and Spices'. Scholars have often interpreted this as a moment of extraordinary intersection between literary history and the history of discovery. Portuguese expectations of what they would find in mainland India and the Indian Ocean World were formed, the story goes, by legends of Christians, spices and glorious wealth retold down the centuries. Seduced by stories of St Thomas's mission in India, the legendary Priest-King Prester John of the Three Indies, and of the fabulous wealth and spices of India, the Portuguese misread myth and imaginative literature for truth, with serendipitous (for Europeans) results.The seductive myth of serendipitous discovery brought about by myth and legend has until now proven stubbornly resistant to investigation. Yet some facts within the narrative strike discordant notes. Portuguese vessels used in Vasco da Gama's expedition were specially-designed hybrids, reinforced to enable them to carry cannon. Vasco's da Gama's maritime mission to Calicut was also not the first by the Portuguese; it followed a secret overland one by Pêro da Covilhã, disguised as a Muslim - a disguise which in itself suggests some prior knowledge of the political configuration of the Indian Ocean World trading region. Whereas Portuguese self-representations paint Western Europeans as innocent seekers after myth and legend, their actions show them as canny manipulators, informed by careful research, and better prepared for hostilities than for diplomacy. This anecdote should warn us that there is a gap between what, in this period leading up to European political ascendancy in the Indian Ocean world, western Europeans wrote about the region, about their intentions and desires towards it, and the kinds of activities that they undertook there. This monograph investigates that gap. It will show that fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Western Europeans had access to detailed and recent accounts of India, the Indian Ocean World and the Far East, and that these accounts were widely copied, read and used across Europe, but for different reasons among different audiences. The book will describe what was done with Medieval Western European accounts of the Indian Ocean World, setting out how and why knowledge of the Indian Ocean World was circulated, manipulated, deployed, concealed, and made strategically useful within Medieval Europe. As part of its investigation, the book will look in detail at the kinds of writing and other forms of representation of the Indian Ocean World that circulated in late-Medieval Europe. Textual representations influenced literature, art, and cartography, and were read by clerics, laypeople, merchants, nobles, administrators, missionaries and scholars. But reading is something that happens in real places and circumstances in the world: in monastic libraries; at court; in a shop; alone; in a group; in periods of militant Christian or aggressive mercantile expansion; in periods of fear of political or religious 'others'. This book will show how these circumstances and situations affected the way texts were read and used. What did real medieval readers know and believe about the Indian Ocean world? How did they use their knowledge? How did political and social changes shape these representations and uses? How did these representations shape their political, social, cultural and economic environments? In short, this book will examine the role of geographical knowledge in the making of self and community, in ratifying or shaking up one's own religious and cultural assumptions, and in preparing for, inspiring and justifying action.