Many regions of the world define what is outside of their normative and accepted practices as taboo and, therefore, these foreign practices are condemned. However, by broadening one's worldview and bringing together a myriad of divergent regional practices, one is better able to perceive different regions of the world as not superior or inferior to one another, but nonetheless equal but different. In his Travels (1360 CE), explorer John Mandeville details various practices of the foreign peoples he had encountered during his travels around the world; many of these rituals would be strongly denounced by the European readers for whom Mandeville wrote this book. Although chapter 22 of Travels does not explicitly mention tolerance as a primary motivation for the work, the reader's understanding of perceptually heinous but permissive acts in these foreign countries sketches alternative models of normative behavior. European members of 16th-century popular cultures, such as Ginzburg's Menocchio, applied their interpretive filter to reading and synthesized notions that more closely reflected their popular way of life. Mandeville's tales of foreign cannibalism, disfigured peoples, idolatry, and emphasis on nature faced a popular interpretation in the 16th century that formulated a provocative and tolerant worldview in response to the imposing cultural center /definition of a higher culture by the Council of Trent. Foreign cannibals attribute a new meaning to this act insofar as it aims to limit the suffering of an inevitable victim of the disease. While most Europeans perceive cannibalism as a heinous act of carnal violence, others, such as the island of Dondia, view it as a charitable act aimed at preventing the individual from committing unnecessary acts.... middle of paper......higher culture, who is on the side of popular culture? This question sheds light on the defects of the Council of Trent in terms of tolerance by defining a cultural center; there will always be groups outside the center. These groups diverging from the established center became popular culture. Mandeville's travels shed light on how unusual accounts of foreign rituals collaborated with popular culture to form a new system of tolerance, one that the Catholic Inquisition would overlook in considering the equal status of a popular culture coexisting. Works Cited Ginzburg, Carlo. Cheese and worms. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.Jones, Doug. “Voyages of discovery”. Lecture at Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY, March 18, 2014. Mandeville, John. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2011.