The Medieval Travel Narrative

Movement as utopia

“…For instance, Marin notes that From the time of More's book and for centuries later, utopias tend to begin with a travel, a departure and a journey, most of the time by sea, most of the time interrupted by a storm, a catastrophe that is the sublime way to open a neutral space, one that is absolutely different: a meteoric event, a cosmic accident that eliminates all beacons and markers in order to make the seashore appear at dawn, to welcome the human castaway. (Marin, 1993: 414) This was partly due to the general context within which utopian writing emerged: as an extension of travel writing, itself a product of the exploratory expansion of European commerce (Hazard, 1961;Zumthor and Peebles, 1994). Hythloday, the mariner who tells the story of the Isle of Utopia in More's classic, was, in the author's own words, not just a traveler, but a philosopher.…”

“…(Foucault, 1986: 27) 7 It is important, however, to note that the travel narrative need not, by its very nature, be disruptive. Indeed, as Zumthor and Peebles (1994) show, travel writing was a well-established cultural form in the European Middle Ages; all the same, its intent was to achieve the traveler's 'reintegration into the familiar world from which he set off ' (1994: 812). It did not undermine the inelastic medieval spatial and social ordering; instead, it functioned to symbolically appropriate foreign places rather than 'to effect a projection into an expanse' (ibid.…”

Mapping Medieval Utopia: Exercises in Restraint

“…By 1500, Eden no longer appeared on mappaemundi, which signifies that "the space-time view of medieval times was broken." 25 Paul Zumthor has averred that paradise and utopia may be opposites, 26 but the coincidence of Utopia's historical appearance at the moment of Eden's disappearance from the mappamundi form indicates that traditional models of periodization -with their reliance on the rhetoric of epistemological rupture -may be counterproductive to this essay's posthistoricist purposes. "I know the dangers in periodizing .…”

Loss of words and end of worlds: Transitions and troubles of travel writing

“…Outside the Christian tradition, the Arabic literary form rihla -referring to both a journey and the written account of that journey -flourished during medieval and early-modern periods and lasted up to the seventeenth century(Euben 2008, Youngs 2013, Zumthor and Peebles 1994.…”