Authenticity in Marco Polo’s Story and in Honors Student Research: An Aside from the Early Renaissance

Authors

Bill Knox, Western Illinois UniversityFollow

Date of this Version

Fall 2008

Comments

Published in Journal of the National Collegiate Honors Council 9:2, Fall/Winter 2008. Copyright © 2008 by the National Collegiate Honors Council.

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.