Speculative evidence in Trickster Travels

Trickster Travels is a fascinating tale of al-Hasan al-Wazzan, a man who operated in the highest echelons of society both in North Africa and even upon his capture and servitude in Western Europe. Davis depicts a truly cosmopolitan man. His position as a diplomat in North Africa projects him to the Pope’s palace in servitude as his captors recognized his significance gaining him important protectors/masters. He enters himself into the margins of the “elite humanist circles” (74). In many ways this makes sense, as Davis writes later, al-Hasan wrote his book on Africa in a form that would be acceptable to both Europeans and Africans in the vernacular language ever aware of his audience and indeed courting it. Nevertheless, throughout the book Davis has to fill in gaps with speculative language, which she explains is necessary in the beginning. This language sometimes, however, takes on an explanatory power alone. Taking our example above, Davis explains that al-Hasan ran in those margins of the “elite humanist circles” through the combination of assumed conversations between al-Hasan and Paulo Giovio and Valeriano, and the absence of evidence in their writings of the ambassador of Fez as one of their sources is exemplary of his marginal status. The assumption are mutually sustaining of one another. The evidence is al-Hasan’s familiarity with those figures about which Giovio wrote, but there were significant go-betweens in the Mediterranean during this time (of which al-Hasan certain accounts as one) from whom Giovio could gain his insights. I’m not sure if that speculation places him on the margins of humanist elites at the time.

I do not want to be min-understood, Trickster Travels is a fascinating book, and Davis brings to bear a very interesting reading of al-Hasan’s writings along with supplementary material to reconstruct his life. Indeed, it might be said, I’m making a mountain out of a molehill. Certainly, the example above is exceptional, but it is demonstrative of the sort of speculative language Davis must use to fill in the sources where they are lacking with circumstantial evidence. What remains, however, is a figure able to navigate these two separate places and cultures, and who (as Davis indicates in the Epilogue with her comparison with Rabelais) represents a greater similarity in “ways of thinking and writing” despite those differences.