Spaces of Enunciation: Franciscan Narratives of the Sino-Mongol City

Focused principally on the city of Quanzhou (Zayton), this paper will explore Franciscan narratives of popular religion in the Sino-Mongol city, including self-reflexive accounts of Roman Rite practices. In order to understand the landscapes of religious infrastructure, material artifacts, and practiced ritual in Quanzhou – and by extension in other Sino-Mongol cities – this paper will contextualize Franciscan accounts vis-à-vis those which, from the European perspective, might be understood to be written in the vernacular (i.e., those written in literary Chinese and languages other than Latin). In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau described the city as a “space of enunciation,” in which walkers perform possible cities through their ambulatory choices. On the basis of Latin sources, this paper will highlight the iterations of the Sino-Mongol city and its popular religious practices reified by Franciscan observers through though narrative inclusion/exclusion: these provide one set of possibilities for understanding the spiritual life of the Sino-Mongol city. Then, by triangulating between Latin sources, vernacular texts, and surviving objects/monuments, this paper will compare and contrast the iterations of the Sino-Mongol city created by a variety of observers active in a multiconfessional, multifaith environment better to understand the Franciscan perspective on – and relationship to – the culturally complex site of their establishments.