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<p>In <i>The Book of John Mandeville</i>, women-monster episodes are often read as exotic spectacle or as tests of credibility. This article argues instead that they function as institutional scripts: scenes that cast marvels in rule-like forms—conditional bargains, shared-access arrangements, and appointed offices—whose obligations and consequences become legible without eyewitness proof. Focusing on Hippocrates’ dragon-daughter on Lango, the communal women of Lamuri, and the later island sequence of gemstone-eyed women and the poison maiden, I show how <i>Mandeville</i> organizes wonder around entitlement, distribution, and bodily risk. Across these cases, governance takes three compact forms: a conditional bargain that links a dragon-woman’s kiss to treasure and lordship; a Lamuri rule governing sexual access, landholding, and offspring; and a custom in which paid testers assume the first risk of sexual contact and face punishment for failed performance. Wonder emerges less as spectacle than as a portable narrative technology for imagining enforceable order across Christian, chivalric, customary, and quasi-legal forms of obligation.</p>

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Contracts of wonder: Women-monsters, procedure, and global order in The Book of John Mandeville

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年7月8日

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  • Xiuli Zhang

摘要

In The Book of John Mandeville, women-monster episodes are often read as exotic spectacle or as tests of credibility. This article argues instead that they function as institutional scripts: scenes that cast marvels in rule-like forms—conditional bargains, shared-access arrangements, and appointed offices—whose obligations and consequences become legible without eyewitness proof. Focusing on Hippocrates’ dragon-daughter on Lango, the communal women of Lamuri, and the later island sequence of gemstone-eyed women and the poison maiden, I show how Mandeville organizes wonder around entitlement, distribution, and bodily risk. Across these cases, governance takes three compact forms: a conditional bargain that links a dragon-woman’s kiss to treasure and lordship; a Lamuri rule governing sexual access, landholding, and offspring; and a custom in which paid testers assume the first risk of sexual contact and face punishment for failed performance. Wonder emerges less as spectacle than as a portable narrative technology for imagining enforceable order across Christian, chivalric, customary, and quasi-legal forms of obligation.