Cult-images and Religious Ethnology: the European Exploration of Medieval Asia and the Discovery of New Iconic Religions

The geographic knowledge of Central and Far Eastern Asia was impressively widened, during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, by a great number of literary reports that described the customs, religions, and cultural habits of several previously ignored peoples. Since Ramusio’s times, scholars dealing with the history of European explorations have often taken into account such phenomena as a preliminary step to the expansion of Western civilization throughout the rest of the world during the modern era. Much less attention has been paid to the actual contingencies such early explorers experienced during their journeys and the cultural patterns they made use of in their first contacts with the unknown populations living in those distant countries.