Travel, Writing, and the Global Middle Ages

Abstract

Travel and mobility were vital aspects of medieval European experience. Historians have long recognised this through studies of migration, exile, everyday journeys and long-distance voyages as recorded in travellers' reports and narratives. Yet it is only in recent decades that a distinct field of medieval travel writing studies has emerged. This article surveys recent significant contributions to the study of travel literature of the period c. 300 to c. 1500, concentrating on secondary scholarship in English and particularly on works published or reissued since the late 1990s. It considers issues of genre, offers a definition of 'medieval travel writing' and proposes the authorial category of the 'writer-traveller'. It examines selected recent trends in study of Christian pilgrimage, European travel writing on the wider world and medieval Islamic and Jewish voyage literature. It notes that there has been heightened attention to women and gender, to 'virtual' pilgrimage as Christian devotion, to attempts at cross-cultural comprehension before the age of European imperialism and to the distinctive perspectives offered by Muslim and Jewish authors. Concluding with suggestions for future directions, including enhanced attention to gender theory and cross-cultural comparison, it finally argues for the place of travel writing studies in histories of medieval globalism following the global turn.As is increasingly recognised, travel was fundamental to the medieval condition. In an age before modern communications and mass transportation of goods, many individuals had to travel for work, business, interactions and exchanges. It is true that dominant cultures of Latin Christendom valorised the settled, the agrarian and the urban, over the roaming, the nomadic and the cityless, and that to an extent travel was perceived as a disruption to normative modes of being rather than comprehended as a permanent process. In opposition to the nomadic populations of, for example, central Asia, European cultural traditions from the Greeks onward had denigrated the ways of life of people in perpetual motion. 1 Moreover, travel would have been limited for certain groups. Men and women born into serfdom were not supposed to leave their manor without the consent of their lord and payment of a fine; parishioners were enjoined to receive the sacraments within their home parishes; monks and nuns of many orders were supposed to remain enclosed within their communities; and women in general were more restricted than men in the physical boundaries of their worlds. Yet the stubborn caricature of medieval people as confined within limited geographical horizons, with village dwellers rarely venturing even to the next hamlet, now holds little sway in serious scholarship. 2 On the highways and byways of medieval Europe, we would find people travelling for work or trade, for preaching or pilgrimage, to wage war or in f light from it, to deliver justice or abscond from it, to beg or to gather revenues, to embark on a period of exile, to forge treaties ...

World(‐)Systems, West Africa, and the Global Middle Ages

“…But, as described above, influences from existing paradigms have helped devalue the potential role of West Africa in global‐historical processes (Holmes & Standen, 2015, p. 107). New approaches, even “reconsidering … basic themes,” must be on the table (Phillips, 2016, p. 87). Terminologically rigid Eurocentrism, intentional or otherwise, can hinder analysis and shape inaccurate narratives (Wells, 2015, p. 436).…”