National Collegiate Honors Council
Date of this Version
Fall 2008
Abstract
Recently I read and skimmed editions of the writings of Marco Polo, including Komroff’s The Travels of Marco Polo and Moule and Pelliot’s encyclopedic The Description of the World. Apart from cataloguing details about Asian lands, peoples, and inventions fantastic in the eyes of early fourteenth- century Europeans, these, along with Laurence Bergreen’s well-documented biography Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu, unexpectedly suggested to me how, increasingly in this digital age, student research projects present questions of authenticity similar to those of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts—Polo’s being no exception.
Comments
Published in Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council 9:2, Fall/Winter 2008. Copyright © 2008 by the National Collegiate Honors Council.