Medieval Travel Research Articles

Mobile language-networks and medieval travel writing

This article examines medieval portrayals of language contact across a range of texts, including travel narratives and plays depicting xenoglossia (speaking in tongues). Engaging with John Law's discussion of the mobile ship and Actor Network Theory (ANT), this essay conceives polyglot contact zones – spaces where languages come together and influence one another – as dynamic ‘network objects.’ Literary texts about travel employ innovative strategies for conveying the experience of transit over land and sea, and they encourage readers to imagine the subjective experience of moving through ever-shifting linguistic environments. In their intricate modes of representing life in transit, medieval texts invite multiple avenues for theorizing the ‘network object’ (such as a ship or a pilgrimage company) that is itself in perpetual motion.

Sir John Mandeville: The Book of Marvels and Travels tr. by Anthony Bale, and: The Book of John Mandeville with Related Texts ed. by Iain Macleod Higgins (review)

Reviewed by: Sir John Mandeville: The Book of Marvels and Travels tr. by Anthony Bale, and: The Book of John Mandeville with Related Texts ed. by Iain Macleod Higgins Kim M. Phillips Anthony Bale, trans. Sir John Mandeville: The Book of Marvels and Travels. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. xxxviii, 178. £8.99; $16.75 paper. Iain Macleod Higgins, ed. and trans. The Book of John Mandeville with Related Texts. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2011. Pp. xxvii, 292. $39.95 cloth; $12.95 paper. Perhaps translations are like buses: you wait ages for one to turn up, only to have two arrive almost at once. Such is the case for the Book (as I will generically call it) of “Sir John Mandeville” (c. 1357), a fictional traveler with a name most likely assumed: a literary magpie whose thefts from authentic travel books and related texts produced a work of tremendous importance to later medieval European culture. Surviving in around 300 manuscript copies and at least 10 European languages, Mandeville’s Book needs a place in any undergraduate survey course on medieval literature. It has received a revival in recent times along with reinvigorated interest in medieval travel writing and cross-cultural encounters, so it is fitting that accessible texts be produced to meet the needs of undergraduate and general readers who may not be ready to tackle the available critical editions. Bale’s and Higgins’s admirable and very affordable volumes are both welcome for expanding our range of translation options. Readers looking for a translation of a Middle English version of the [End Page 376] Book for courses in medieval English literature may now turn to Bale’s book to replace C. W. R. D. Moseley’s Penguin Classics version (1983; revised 2005). Bale chooses the widely circulated “Defective” version (working from Oxford, Queen’s College MS 383 and related manuscripts in consultation with M. C. Seymour’s EETS edition, 2002), so called because of its omission of material on Egypt and Sicily. He supplements this with some material from its Anglo-French source (taken from Christiane Deluz’s edition, 2000) and fills the “Egypt gap” with the relevant extract from London, British Library, MS Egerton 1982 (edited by Seymour, 2010). Bale’s translation is thus, in effect, a synthetic version of Mandeville rather than a straight translation of a medieval text, and he is “unabashed” in admitting that his is, in effect, a “new version” (xxx). Bale shows a lightness of touch in translation, which remains close to the syntax of the Middle English while avoiding archaism. To take a sentence almost at random, the original “For to speke of Ierusalem, 9e schal vndirstonde þat it stondiþ faire among hullis, and þere is no ryuer noþer welle but water coming by condyt fro Ebron” (Seymour, 2002) becomes “Next, to speak of Jerusalem: you need to know that it is well situated amongst hills, and there are neither rivers nor wells, the only water comes by conduit from Hebron” (Bale, 39). While the punctuation appears a little odd, it provides a good sense of the rhythms of the original. Bale has also followed a sensible course in modernizing place names and other proper nouns “where they are one step away from a clear contemporary reference,” and in using mainly English forms, except in cases of fantastical names such as “Milstorak” (xxix). Bale’s introduction offers a pithy and elegant overview of current scholarship on the nature of the text; current theories on authorship (like Higgins, he chooses to remain agnostic on this problem, though W. Mark Ormrod’s recent extension of Michael Bennett’s archival researches into a contemporary Essex Mandeville family in Chaucer Review [2012] provides yet more food for thought); the relevance of St Albans to medieval cartography and geographic discourse; evidence for the Book’s medieval readership; and Mandeville’s chief sources, attitudes, and later influences. Bale’s bibliography is brief but would serve as a basic introduction for newcomers to the topic, aided by his notes on measurements, chronology, and maps. Explanatory notes on the text are kept short, and mainly provide biblical references or give context to potentially puzzling passages. There...

Utopische Elemente der mittelalterlichen Reiseliteratur

This article investigates utopian elements in accounts of journeys to the East that circulated in the German-speaking areas in the fourteenth century. The travelogues studied are German translations of the reports of Odoric of Pordenone, Marco Polo and John Mandeville. The paper begins by elaborating on a notion of utopia that can serve as a genre-specific analytical tool for tracing characteristics of early modern utopias in medieval travel literature. At the centre of this notion lies a social structure which significantly differs from the social structure known to the western traveller. Further characteristics complement this concept, particularly those concerning the literary form employed in these descriptions of utopian societies. The second part of this article will specifically examine the social conditions in the utopian societies presented in the travelogues studied. In addition it will deal with the aesthetic strategies employed by the texts to create specific places, in which kingdoms and other communities with utopian traits are situated in medieval travel literature.

Hobson-Jobson: The Definitive Glossary of British India by Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell (review)

Reviewed by: Hobson-Jobson: The Definitive Glossary of British India by Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell Traci Nagle (bio) Yule, Henry, and A. C. Burnell. Hobson-Jobson: The Definitive Glossary of British India, selected edition. Ed. Kate Teltscher. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. xlv + 570. $27.95, €14.99. ISBN 978-0-19-960113-4 Is there an author out there who does not wish, when sending off a completed manuscript, that his or her book will succeed enough to warrant a second edition? Henry Yule, a military engineer who had turned, in his retirement from British India, into a well-regarded editor and annotator of medieval travel narratives, harbored just such hope as he sent off the final bits of his long-gestated Hobson-Jobson manuscript (co-authored with the late Arthur Burnell) to his London publisher, John Murray, in early January 1886. In closing his preface, Yule wrote, “My first endeavor in preparing this work has been to make it accurate; my next to make it—even though a Glossary—interesting.” Should he have failed at that second goal, he continued, there would be “little to be hoped for from a second edition.” Although the glossary was generally well-received and accrued a number of glowing reviews in the year it was published, it was no blockbuster. When Yule died in 1889, the glossary was selling steadily but slowly, and it would take another eleven years for its initial British print run of one thousand copies to sell out (JMA, Ms. 42733, f. 62 et seq.). There is no evidence that John Murray was even contemplating a second edition (perhaps because Yule was dead in 1889) until the ethnographer and retired British Indian civil servant William Crooke proposed writing one in February 1900, after noticing in Murray’s catalogue that Hobson-Jobson had gone out of print. Murray accepted Crooke’s proposal and published Crooke’s edited second edition in 1903. Sales were steady but not stellar: a dozen years later, of the 1,500 copies of Crooke’s edition printed in 1903, more than 600 remained in Murray’s warehouse, and the book had not yet earned a profit (JMA, Ms. 42737, f. 11 et seq.). And yet, since the mid-1960s, a steady stream of reprint editions based on Crooke’s work has kept Hobson-Jobson on the market and on the minds of aficionados and nostalgists of British India, as well as historians, lexicographers, and other scholars. (The latest of [End Page 225] these reprints was published in 2013 by New Age Books, New Delhi.) A number of electronic versions of Crooke’s edition are also available online, including a version published by the Digital Dictionaries of South Asia project at the University of Chicago.1 Hobson-Jobson aimed to document and explain (not just define) the words that had been adopted into English from the many languages the British encountered in their vast Asian empire. Although its original subtitle advertises a focus on “Anglo-Indian” words, within it the adventurous reader can also find adoptions that entered English from Arabic, Persian, Afghan, Tibetan, Chinese, Burmese, Malay, and other languages, apparently without having made a stopover in India. In compiling evidence of each entry word’s use, Yule & Burnell drew on an astounding range of sources: from the travel narratives with which Yule was quite familiar as president of the Hakluyt Society, to government and legal documents; histories; newspapers and magazines; journals, memoirs and diaries; poetry and novels; dictionaries of all stripes; and books on sports and cookery, on plants, animals, and birds, on art, geology, and fairy tales. Their access to and knowledge of medieval travel narratives, combined with their polyglotism, unearthed for readers evidence not just of the first use of terms in English, but often very early mentions of these terms by other Europeans, such as ancient Greek references to Brahmins; Pliny’s Latin description of sugar, the etymology of which is traced to Sanskrit; the commentaries of the French navigator François Pyrard de Laval on the presence in the early 1600s of the Portuguese in India; and the reports of the Portuguese travelers Gaspar Correa and Garcia de...

Knowledge, Culture, and Positionality: Analysis of Three Medieval Muslim Travel Accounts

This study provides an analysis of al-rihla account of three Medieval Muslim travelers: Nasir Khasraw (1004-1077), Ibn Jubayr (1145-1217), and Ibn Battuta (1304-1378). The three travelers were selected from different eras, provinces, cultural backgrounds, and schools of Islamic thought and philosophy in Medieval Muslim society. This study intended to answer two questions: 1) what do the three travelers report about their al-rihla experiences? And 2) what factors influenced the three travelers’ experiences of al-rihla as Muslim travelers in search for knowledge? The Holistic Content analysis method in Narrative Analysis was selected to analyze the data. The data analysis resulted in six themes: 1) hajj, the Pilgrimage to Mecca was conducted as, a religious obligation, repentance for sins, and a physical and spiritual path in seeking God’s/Allah’s forgiveness; 2) the theme of seeking knowledge in Islam is strongly associated with hajj; 3) place is a significant theme; 4) emphasis on Islamic principles applied into practice; 5) pride in religious identity as a Muslim; 6) the peaceful co-existence of Muslims, Christians, and Jews was recounted in the three travel accounts. The study concludes that al-rihla accounts of the three Medieval travelers were strongly influenced by three major factors: beliefs about knowledge/seeking knowledge in Islam, culture and cultural identity, and issues of power and positionality. Key words: Al-rihla; Medieval Muslim Travelers (MMT); Hajj; Place and space; Positionality introduction

‘No Milkless Cow’: The Cross of Christ in Medieval Irish Literature

The cross of Christ in the Middle Ages was the most powerful symbol of God’s victory over sin, death and the forces of evil, while also representing the most abject suffering and degradation of Jesus Christ, the God-Man. A simplistic reading of the evolution of the theology of the cross during this period posits a transition from the early medieval victorious and heroic Christ figure, reigning and triumphant upon the cross, to a late medieval emaciated and tortured object of pity whose ignominious death was supposed to elicit heartfelt compassion for his plight and sincere sorrow for the sin which placed him on the beams of the tree of crucifixion. Of course, there is a great deal of value in this argument, and much evidence might be brought forward to support its central thesis. However, it should not be pushed too far; it might also be remembered that the essential paradox of Christ the victor-victim is a constant theme in Christian theology, expressed in the sixth-century Vexilla regis in its identification of the cross as ‘victim of the passion’s glory, by which life brought death to an end, and, by death, gave life again’ and in the hymn Victimae paschali laudes from the central medieval period: ‘Death with life contended, combat strangely ended, life’s own champion slain yet lives to reign’. The image of the victorious cross of Christ, conceived of as simultaneously an instrument of triumph and of torture, would persist right through the late medieval period, despite the development of a greater emphasis on the physical sufferings of Christ in his passion and their ever more graphic depictions. This essay, which examines the way in which the cross of Christ is presented in medieval Irish literature, provides sufficient examples to make this point clear; these are drawn from a variety of sources including religious verse, saints’ lives, medieval travel accounts and sermon material. Of course, these examples are best viewed within the context of a broader medieval European devotional culture from which Ireland was certainly not immune.

Conversos and Novamente Convertidos: Law, Religion, and Identity in the Portuguese Kingdom and Empire

AbstractIn this essay, I intend to demonstrate that the foundations of the attitudes of the Portuguese crown and its agents in relation to the native populations living in the imperial territories were mainly inspired by the relations in Portugal with Jews, and later, Conversos. Besides the strong influence of classical inspiration and a rereading of medieval travelers on the construction of the imperial territories, the ways of thinking about, identifying, and governing internal others served as a reference guide to interpret and model the social situations that emerged in the Portuguese imperial territories. Indeed, the establishment of analogies between the populations of the kingdom and imperial populations had a great practical impact, and molded a good part of the political solutions that were delineated initially as extra territorium, particularly those in the territory of Goa.

Surveying the Aspect of the Medieval West Anatolian Town

The aim of this short article is modest: it means to fill a lacuna in scholarly output by offering a concise and accessible survey of the physical structure of the typical west Anatolian town in the High Middle Ages. Attempts to locate such a study meet with disappointment. If one wishes to look through the eyes of medieval travellers in Anatolia, whether they be merchants, pilgrims or soldiers, and discover what type of construction they witnessed when approaching and entering a typical town, one is compelled to trawl through a great number of specialist articles and monographs dealing with specific archaeological sites or particular narrow periods of history. This laborious exercise will be made somewhat redundant by a brief synthesis of the appropriate evidence which historians and archaeologists have addressed and compiled since the late 1950s when attempting to reconstruct the development of the Byzantine city. The article traces the slow development of the typical Anatolian urban form and aspect from the late fourth century, through the mid-seventh to mid-eighth centuries, and then through to a period of urban recovery until the latter part of the twelfth century. The choice of periods separated by some 800 years is not arbitrary: the physical character (and function) of the typical town began to change in the late fourth century, and the form it obtained during the seventh and eighth centuries continued to be the one retained (with inconsequential variations to the general pattern) during the intermediate periods of Byzantine recovery

The Art, Science, and Technology of Medieval Travel (review)

Reviewed by: The Art, Science, and Technology of Medieval Travel Kristen M. Figg (bio) The Art, Science, and Technology of Medieval Travel. Edited by Robert Bork and Andrea Kann. Aldershot, Hants, and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. xiv+225. $99.95. In this collection of thirteen essays, Robert Bork and Andrea Kann have brought together four travel-related topics that help us explore the "dialog between theories and practices of travel" (p. 7) and understand the "importance of travel in catalyzing fruitful medieval developments in artistic, scientific, and technical fields" (p. 13). Divided into sections entitled Medieval Vehicles and Logistics, Medieval Travel and the Arts, Medieval Maps and Their Uses, and Medieval Navigational Instruments, the volume does not purport to be comprehensive even within individual sections, but rather offers snapshots of specific logistical situations, material developments, and theoretical viewpoints that suggest larger patterns in the relationships between cultural attitudes, travel practices, and technological advance. As might be expected, not every essay addresses every variable—and indeed the reader may feel a mental jolt when moving from an essay on transporting bricks in England to others on portal decoration, frescoes, and psalter illustration in Italy and France. But together the chapters do offer the reader a chance to sample both the imaginative and practical aspects of medieval travel, reminding us at the very least that medieval technology developed in response to social impulses quite different from our own. For those interested in the specific cultural forces that led to the development and use of roads, waterways, conveyances, and navigational instruments, the first and last sections of the book will be most satisfying. At the beginning, Bernard S. Bachrach's essay on "Carolingian Military Operations" describes how Charlemagne and his successors gave their armies a distinct logistical advantage by distributing foodstuffs by means of surviving Roman roads enhanced through mapping, regulations, and a new technology for watertight royal war-carts. In contrast to this early impulse toward standardization, John E. Dotson's essay on Mediterranean ship design from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries describes how new types of vessels resulted from the desire to combine features of "fast, narrow, oar-powered warships" (galleys) and "slow, broad, sail-powered merchant ships" (round ships) (p. 31) in order to achieve optimum cargo capacity, safety, and frequency of usage. Julian Munby, in "From Carriage to Coach," concludes that the "great transport revolution" of the sixteenth century, when carriages that had mainly transported women were replaced by coaches carrying passengers of both genders, involved no substantial change in the technology of the vehicle itself; in this case, the tendency for men to stop traveling by horseback was sociological, and the technological improvements (sprung suspension and glazed windows) would come a century later. On the other hand, David Kennett finds that brick and other building materials [End Page 499] were transported by road, rather than by water, more often than previously believed, simply because of local conditions, not culture. While the second section of the book will be of less direct interest to readers following developments in technology, it does provide an important framework for understanding the medieval cultural environment. "Pilgrims and Portals in Late Medieval Siena" describes how city walls might be used symbolically to create communal identity in a city located on a major pilgrimage highway, while "The Strange Lands of Ambrogio Lorenzetti" explains the impulse to paint alien peoples as a way of emphasizing the city's successful mercantile and missionary enterprises. Concluding with "Spiritual Pilgrimage in the Psalter of Bonne of Luxembourg," this group of essays leads logically into the theoretical discussion of maps that begins, in section 3, with Nigel Hiscock's review of how the Christian Platonist worldview influenced concepts of space. More specifically, Dan Terkla examines how a particular theoretical map, the Hereford Mappa Mundi, might have been presented to contemporary audiences. Focusing on real travel, Nick Millea's study of the Gough Map, the earliest surviving route map of England, uses digitized image-capture to draw conclusions about the map's origins and function, while Evelyn Edson describes how Petrarch used both theoretical and geographical maps to write a travel guide to the Holy Land. In the book's...

Rêver d’Orient, connaître l’Orient: visions de l’Orient dans l’art et la littérature britanniques ed. by Isabelle Gadoin, Marie-Élise Palmier-Chatelain (review)

504 Reviews Latin tradition of consolation could be turned to creative use, especially when fused with the tradition of vernacular poetry. Readers, however, would have welcomed more engagement with the amatory tradition and its roots,whether in the classical world ofOvid or in themedieyal world of the troubadours?particularly in regard to the depiction and remedy of lovesickness. It is surprising that a volume entitled theErotics ofConsolation does not address the topos of voluptas dolendi, although Kay abuts the concept in her piece. In this regard Petrarch would have been a central figure, as he made the transition from the sweet grief of the vernacular love poet to the more profound' aegritudo and accidia of the Latin Stoic and penitent?thus reflecting the flip side of the process described by many of these essays. Still, the volume offersmany insightful approaches for studying the inter section(s) between psychological experience, classical consolation, and literature in the latemedieval and earlymodern world. University of Alabama George McClure River d'Orient, connaitre VOrient: visions de VOrient dans Vart et la litterature bri tanniques. Ed. by Isabelle Gadoin and Marie-Elise Palmier-Chatelain. (Signes) Lyon: Ecole normale superieure: Lettres et sciences humaines. 2008. 366 pp. 34. ISBN 978-2-84788-137-0. This volume of eighteen thematic essays is the product of an interdisciplinary colloquium in 2003 that responded to a central problem raised but not resolved by Edward Said's Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1995 [1978]), p. 8: what is the relationship at theheart of the orientalist project entre ledesir d'Orient et ce savoir colonial, entre reve et connaissance'? The volume brings together an exceptionally diverse collection of responses to this question on subjects ranging from the 'mar vels of theEast' tradition inOld andMiddle English literature to twentieth-century British colonial architecture and town planning. The editors have organized their disparate material into four parts. 'Merveilles, mythe, mysticisme' is a subtitlemore alliterative than accurate, uniting discussions of the marvellous in the real and Active accounts of medieval travellers (Anne Matheiu, 'De la realite au fantasme') with a biographical approach toHenry Wallis, connoisseur and collector of Islamic ceramics (Isabelle Gadoin, 'HenryWallis') and a discussion of the changing representation of Scheherazade innineteenth-century English editions of theArabian Nights from amartyr figure to a potential avenger (Margaret Sironval, 'LTmage de Sheherazade'). 'L'Autre Face du fantasme: l'orient partie du despotisme' is a coherent group of essays that explore the rhetorical and political use made of the trope of oriental tyranny and despotism fromElizabethan representations of Persian, Ottoman, and 'Tartar' rulership (Ladan Niayesh, '"Persians now, as of old'"; Corinne Lefevre, 'Entre despotisme et vertu') to the persistent myth of the unrestrained power of theOttoman Sultan in the Enlightenment (Ann Thompson, 'L'Empire ottoman'). As a group, these essays forcefully underline that the construction of a given MLR, 105.2, 2010 505 ruler as despotic or otherwise is closely linked both to contemporary diplomatic manoeuvres and to the politics of thewriter who produces it. 'Terres du desir: ecriture de soi, ecriture de l'autre' features three essays that focus on writers' engagements with Arabia. All three encounter at some point the problem of interchange between self and other. European travellers describing Mecca must, in a very literal sense, become other: theymust convert to Islam to see the holy sites (Marie-Elise Palmier-Chatelain, 'Rever, voir, savoir?'). Nineteenth and twentieth-century writers employ a range of literary and linguistic techniques to emphasize or overcome the alterity of their subject-matter, including inter textuality,meticulous mimesis, and estrangement through lexical archaism (Guy Barthelemy, Anthropologic et litterarie'; Catherine Delmas, 'Soif de deserts'). The task of lexical and cultural translation at the heart of the encounter between self and a temporal and cultural other is explored in Laurence Chamlou's excellent article on Gertrude Bell's mid-nineteenth-century translations of the fourteenth century Persian poet Hafez's ghazals ('De la connaissance de l'Orient aux reves d'une Occidentale'). Bell's attempts to translate Hafez faithfully into English verse prove Robert Frost's dictum that 'Poetry iswhat gets lost in translation'. Bell's efforts show her own extensive knowledge of medieval Persian culture, and yet sometimes result in comically inappropriate English...

The Art, Science and Technology of Medieval Travel

International Journal of Nautical ArchaeologyVolume 39, Issue 1 p. 212-213 The Art, Science and Technology of Medieval Travel JOE FLATMAN, JOE FLATMAN Institute of Archaeology, University College LondonSearch for more papers by this author JOE FLATMAN, JOE FLATMAN Institute of Archaeology, University College LondonSearch for more papers by this author First published: 04 February 2010 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1095-9270.2009.00260_14.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume39, Issue1March 2010Pages 212-213 RelatedInformation

Beyond the Horizons of Legends:Traditional Imagery and Direct Experience in Medieval Accounts of Asia

AbstractThe article deals with several medieval travel accounts about Asia, which were produced during the 13th and 14th centuries, in the time of the so called Mongol mission. These reports were written by Franciscan and also some Dominican missionaries, namely William of Rubruck, John Plano of Carpini, Odoric of Pordenone, John of Marignola, Jordanus Catalanus and a few others. The aim of the article is to analyze the encounter of European travelers’ “traditional” ideas about Asia with the actual reality. Did the friars mostly rely on their anticipations, or were they open to new information, even if this could destroy views often advocated by eminent authorities of European medieval thought? The article analyses three “traditional” topoi, each of them in the context of the above-mentioned reports: earthly paradise, the kingdom of Prester John and human monsters. All of them belonged to the medieval lore regarding the East, as testified by many literary as well as pictorial documents. Each of the authors adopted a slightly different strategy for how to solve the potential conflicts between “tradition” and experience. Finally, I suggest conceptualizing the problem of “tradition” and experience in medieval travel accounts with reference to a typology of “otherness” created by Karlheinz Ohle. According to Ohle, a “cognitive Other” (1) is an unknown, never encountered Other which can only be imagined, whereas a “normative Other” (2), is an Other which is directly encountered and gradually explored. In my opinion, the friars’ medieval travel accounts actually reflect a shift from imagination towards gradual encounter and exploration — in these reports the imagined (cognitive) fabulous East gradually turned into an explored (normative) reality.

The Art, Science , and Technology of Medieval Travel

The Art, Science , and Technology of Medieval Travel

Venetië in de ogen van pelgrims - Stedelijkheid en stadservaring in laatmiddeleeuwse reisverhalen uit de Nederlanden

Late medieval travel descriptions offer an intriguing insight in how townsmen perceived the urban environment. Many pilgrims from the Low Countries on their way to Jerusalem stayed at the city of Venice, where most of them interrupted their journey in order to board one of the hundreds of ships sailing to the Levant. Their descriptions of this city represented it as a collection of almost separate spaces. The pilgrims were more interested in how these spaces functioned socially, rather than exactly how they appeared. The actor perspective is dominant. At the centre of the description was the pilgrim himself, how he experienced urban life and how he participated in it. Venice was a place of transition. On the one hand it was considered as something familiar, with the same religion, rituals and social organisation (though on a much grander scale than even in the densely urbanized Low Countries). But at the same time it was also very different, which triggered pilgrims to compare it with their own places of origins and to represent the city and its rituals within their own frame of reference. This explains the attention for the social, political and religious role of each space described and for the movement and social interaction within each space. It was the user of the city who ‘made’ it urban. Considered from this perspective urbanity was no architectural thing, but rather a personal social map.

Colonial Sexism 101? Anthropological Teachings About Women

Images of “Third World” women fill the media: battered victims of starvation, with too many children, hidden behind burqas. Images of “Third World” businesswomen, female politicians, or academics are rare, as is the use of the “other” woman as a model. This attitude has a long history in Western thought, ranging from classical and medieval travel accounts about strange monsters and “bad” women, to the diaries and travel accounts of Western women engaged in colonizing the non- European world, and to contemporary media blips from Afghanistan and Iraq. The imagination of “other” women as powerless, dependent, or unfeminine may also be taught through academic textbooks in cultural anthropology, the only science dedicated to expand the knowledge of human diversity. This article explores how undergraduate students conceptualize the meaning of “Third World” woman and how three widely used textbooks used in undergraduate education could affect students’ attitude through the ways in which they represent non-Western women.

Robert Bork and Andrea Kann (ed.), The Art, Science, and Technology of Medieval Travel,

L’ouvrage reprend, telles quelles ou en les modifiant parfois substantiellement, treize communications qui ont ete presentees en 2006 au Congres international des etudes medievales de Kalamazoo, lors des sessions organises par l’AVISTA (The Association Villard de Honnecourt for Interdisciplinary Study of Medieval Technology, Science, and Art), association dont Robert Bork est le president. Ces etudes se distribuent en quatre parties titrees respectivement Vehicules medievaux et logistique, Vo...

Muslim "Orientalism" in medieval travel accounts of India

Since the late 1970s the term "orientalism" has most often been used to assert the existence of an exoticised, romanticised and often hegemonic European view of the non-Western Other. A similar approach can be seen in travelogues of India written by Middle Eastern and Central Asian Muslims during the pre-modern period. This observation suggests that such approaches to the Other are not unique to Europeans, but may be characteristic of hegemonic cultures in general.

L’ailleurs dans les Voyages de Mandeville (XIVe siècle) : entre rêverie populaire et réflexion savante

Mandeville’s Travels, a fourteenth-century narrative, questions the link between learned and popular culture in medieval travel books. Indeed, the large amount of sources which the author used to depict the world reveals his encyclopedic ambitions. Moreover, Mandeville takes part in the intellectual and scientific reflections of his time. Nevertheless, his narrative is also characterized by a taste for the marvelous, for the pleasures of telling stories and staging sensual pleasures. Now these themes are usually associated with popular culture. A certain tension seems to exist within the book between learned and popular cultures. The unity of the book is nonetheless achieved through a criticism of medieval Christendom which aims at stirring consciences in all levels of society.

Introduction to the special issue—Journeys along the Silk Road: Intercultural approaches to comparative business systems and practices

For 2,000 years, the Silk Road has linked the cultures of the Arab World and northern Asia. Medieval travelers like Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo traded in ideas as well as tangible commodities. Mutual influences between these two worlds have been interpenetrating in their long-lasting impact on business practices and management philosophies. The Silk Road is a network of routes over 6,000 kilometers long, composed of tarmac highways, desert tracks, caravan routes, and long-forgotten paths, linking the major epicenters of civilization. Since records began, it has been the region through which East has met West, providing a conduit for the material goods, invading armies, fleeing refugees, technological innovation, mathematics, empirical science, and language that have shaped the trajectory and framed the styles of European and Asian history and culture. Today, in its geopolitical implications, the region comprising the Silk Road is as influential for the twenty-first century as at any time in the past millennium.

Broader Horizons: A Study of Johannes Witte de Hese's 'Itinerarius' and Medieval Travel Narratives by Scott D. Westrem (review)

528 Reviews thoroughly recommended to anglophone graduate students who have already mastered the clear exposition by Gibbs and Johnson in the extensive Afterword of their 1984 translation in the Penguin Classics series. More seasoned scholars will also find the volume indispensable as a bracing contribution to the issues and cruxes thrown up by this idiosyncratic text in the last three decades. University of Durham Neil Thomas Broader Horizons: A Study of Johannes Witte de Hese's Ttinerarius' and Medieval Travel Narratives. By Scott D. Westrem. (Medieval Academy Books, 105) Cambridge, MA: The Medieval Academy of America. 2001. xxiii + 359 pp. $30. ISBN 0-915651-10-6 (hbk). This book, the fruit of two decades of intermittent work developing the author's doctoral thesis (Northwestern University, 1985), is a study of what purports to be an account of a pilgrimage undertaken by the shadowy Johannes Witte de Hese, apparently a cleric in the diocese of Utrecht but not more precisely identifiable, to Jerusalem in 1389. Unlike Hans Tucher'sgenuine travel account ofninety years later, recently edited by Randall Herz (Die Reise ins Gelobte Land Hans Tuchers des Alteren (i4jg-i48o) (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2002)), Witte's is a fantasy pastiche of places and data culled from a variety of medieval sources. It tells us nothing about Jerusalem but focuses on his alleged experiences in the Red Sea area and on his subsequent travels to Egypt, Mount Sinai, Prester John's empire, the church of St Thomas in India, Purgatory, and other exotic locations. A sixteenth-century reader of a copy now in the Stadtbibliothek at Trier already declared: 'Dieser author ist ein leibhaffterfabularius gewesenn.' While the work has not previously attracted much serious attention, schol? ars having considered Witte a fantasist 'worthy more of neglect than attention', it is of interest as testifyingto a growing interest in literature about the East in the Lower Rhine area in the fourteenth and fifteenthcenturies: significantly,Prester John's capital is specifically said to be twenty-four times the size of Cologne, and the firstfour printed editions (all published in the 1490s) came from Cologne, with other early ones from Antwerp and Deventer. After considering the content and context ofthe Itinerarius (as the firstprinter,Jo? hann Guldenschaff, called it), the problem of the author's identity and the reception of his work, Westrem presents a painstaking investigation of the textual transmission. The work was written in Latin, of 'sophomoric' quality (p. 65), but was subsequently revised by unknown editors. Eight Latin manuscripts are known, the oldest (not the original but the earliest 'recovered', a term Westrem prefers to 'surviving') perhaps copied in 1424; this is MS 1424/C0 in the University of Minnesota (formerly MS Phillips 6650). Three of the manuscripts were copied from printed editions, testify? ing to continuing interest in the work around 1500. A Middle Dutch translation was also produced, now best known from a transcription made around 1690. Westrem discusses the development of the text in some detail, and then prints the Latin, the Middle Dutch translation, and a modern English rendering ofthe Latin as Chapters 4, 5, and 6 respectively. This mode of presentation already makes it rather difficultfor the reader to compare the three versions, but worse is to come. In Chapter 4, beneath the Latin text, we findthe critical apparatus (pp. 124-54), but this is then followed on pp. 155-81 by seven distinct categories of textual notes: (1) variant spellings of place names and proper nouns; (2) scribal corrections in the Latin manuscripts; (3) ortho? graphical variants in the manuscripts and printed editions; (4) variant presentations of numerals, roman and arabie; (5) grammatical errors in the textual witnesses; (6) scribal marginalia and rubrics; and (7) an inventory of typographical errors in the printed MLRy 99.2, 2004 529 editions. While it is undeniably more convenient to have such details brought together than to have to search for them in the masses of variants recorded in the apparatus, it does make the book extraordinarily difficultto use, unless one is solely concerned with what the work is about, in which case one may safely ignore everything except the Latin text and/or the English translation and the commentary. The...