The East and West in Late Medieval Travel Writings

The East and West in Late Medieval Travel Writings

Author: Na Chang

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2024-10-07

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 1527577082

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This book traces the history of encounter between Eastern and Western cultures by closely examining a body of medieval travel writings penned or related by Europeans and by inhabitants of East Asia. Whilst these texts are usually considered in the context of kindred European or Chinese literature, this study will make a case for considering them as a common literature of medieval encounters with foreign people. For the modern historian writing in a world that so consciously thinks of itself as ‘global’, these accounts offer a precious lens through which to enter into the world before globalization. In particular, the book shows that these narratives show the similarity in how Eastern and Western travellers thought and behaved in the face of difference, and will show that individuals often held somewhat different views, shaped by their particular experience or agendas, than those of their government or of local cultural convention.


The Medieval Invention of Travel

The Medieval Invention of Travel

Author: Shayne Aaron Legassie

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-04-12

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 022644273X

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Over the course of the Middle Ages, the economies of Europe, Asia, and northern Africa became more closely integrated, fostering the international and intercontinental journeys of merchants, pilgrims, diplomats, missionaries, and adventurers. During a time in history when travel was often difficult, expensive, and fraught with danger, these wayfarers composed accounts of their experiences in unprecedented numbers and transformed traditional conceptions of human mobility. Exploring this phenomenon, The Medieval Invention of Travel draws on an impressive array of sources to develop original readings of canonical figures such as Marco Polo, John Mandeville, and Petrarch, as well as a host of lesser-known travel writers. As Shayne Aaron Legassie demonstrates, the Middle Ages inherited a Greco-Roman model of heroic travel, which viewed the ideal journey as a triumph over temptation and bodily travail. Medieval travel writers revolutionized this ancient paradigm by incorporating practices of reading and writing into the ascetic regime of the heroic voyager, fashioning a bold new conception of travel that would endure into modern times. Engaging methods and insights from a range of disciplines, The Medieval Invention of Travel offers a comprehensive account of how medieval travel writers and their audiences reshaped the intellectual and material culture of Europe for centuries to come.


The East and West in Late Medieval Travel

The East and West in Late Medieval Travel

Author: Na Chang

Publisher:

Published: 2024

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781527576865

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This book traces the history of encounter between Eastern and Western cultures by closely examining a body of medieval travel writings penned or related by Europeans and by inhabitants of East Asia. Whilst these texts are usually considered in the context of kindred European or Chinese literature, this study will make a case for considering them as a common literature of medieval encounters with foreign people. For the modern historian writing in a world that so consciously thinks of itself as global, these accounts offer a precious lens through which to enter into the world before globalization. In particular, the book shows that these narratives show the similarity in how Eastern and Western travellers thought and behaved in the face of difference, and will show that individuals often held somewhat different views, shaped by their particular experience or agendas, than those of their government or of local cultural convention.


Before Orientalism

Before Orientalism

Author: Kim M. Phillips

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2013-11-14

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0812208943

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A distinct European perspective on Asia emerged in the late Middle Ages. Early reports of a homogeneous "India" of marvels and monsters gave way to accounts written by medieval travelers that indulged readers' curiosity about far-flung landscapes and cultures without exhibiting the attitudes evident in the later writings of aspiring imperialists. Mining the accounts of more than twenty Europeans who made—or claimed to have made—journeys to Mongolia, China, India, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia between the mid-thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Kim Phillips reconstructs a medieval European vision of Asia that was by turns critical, neutral, and admiring. In offering a cultural history of the encounter between medieval Latin Christians and the distant East, Before Orientalism reveals how Europeans' prevailing preoccupations with food and eating habits, gender roles, sexualities, civility, and the foreign body helped shape their perceptions of Asian peoples and societies. Phillips gives particular attention to the texts' known or likely audiences, the cultural settings within which they found a foothold, and the broader impact of their descriptions, while also considering the motivations of their writers. She reveals in rich detail responses from European travelers that ranged from pragmatism to wonder. Fear of military might, admiration for high standards of civic life and court culture, and even delight in foreign magnificence rarely assumed the kind of secular Eurocentric superiority that would later characterize Orientalism. Placing medieval writing on the East in the context of an emergent "Europe" whose explorers sought to learn more than to rule, Before Orientalism complicates our understanding of medieval attitudes toward the foreign.


Orientalism and Literature

Orientalism and Literature

Author: Geoffrey P. Nash

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-11-14

Total Pages: 674

ISBN-13: 1108585566

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Orientalism and Literature discusses a key critical concept in literary studies and how it assists our reading of literature. It reviews the concept's evolution: how it has been explored, imagined and narrated in literature. Part I considers Orientalism's origins and its geographical and multidisciplinary scope, then considers the major genres and trends Orientalism inspired in the literary-critical field such as the eighteenth-century Oriental tale, reading the Bible, and Victorian Oriental fiction. Part II recaptures specific aspects of Edward Said's Orientalism: the multidisciplinary contexts and scholarly discussions it has inspired (such as colonial discourse, race, resistance, feminism and travel writing). Part III deliberates upon recent and possible future applications of Orientalism, probing its currency and effectiveness in the twenty-first century, the role it has played and continues to play in the operation of power, and how in new forms, neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia, it feeds into various genres, from migrant writing to journalism.


Remapping Travel Narratives, 1000-1700

Remapping Travel Narratives, 1000-1700

Author: Montserrat Piera

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 9781641899499

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"With a specific focus on travel narratives, this collection looks at how Islamic and eastern cultural threads were weaved, through travel and trading networks, into Western European/Christian visual culture and discourse and, ultimately, into the artistic explosion which has been labeled the Renaissance. Scholars from across humanities disciplines examine Islamic, Jewish, Spanish, Italian, and English works from a truly comparative and non-parochial perspective, to explore the transfer through travel of cultural and religious values and artistic and scientific practices, from the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries. During this period travel, military conquest and trade through the Mediterranean placed Western European citizens and merchants in contact with Islamic and eastern technology and culture, and travel narratives illustrate the converging and pragmatic dynamics of cultural acceptance. Perhaps the spread of ŸRenaissanceŒ values and beliefs might have followed a trajectory the reverse of what is generally assumed, and that salient aspects of Renaissance culture traveled from the fringes of Islamic and eastern cultures to the midst of hegemonically Christian polities."--Bloomsbury Publishing.


The Constructions of the East in Western Travel Narratives, 1200 CE to 1800 CE

The Constructions of the East in Western Travel Narratives, 1200 CE to 1800 CE

Author: Radhika Seshan

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2019-09-11

Total Pages: 165

ISBN-13: 1000713059

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This book investigates how the idea of the ‘east’ emerged in western travel narratives between the 13th and the 18th centuries. Sifting through critical travel narratives — real and imagined — it locates the changing geography as well as the perceptions surrounding India. The author presents how historical stereotypes interacted with a burgeoning demand for travelogues during this period and have fed into the way we think about Asia in general, and India in particular. From the mythical travels of Prester John to the enigmatic ‘adventures’ of Marco Polo, from the fraught voyages of Johannes Plano de Carpini to the missionary zeal of Friar Odoric of Pordenone and William of Rubruquis, this volume traces the history of the ‘Orient’ as it was understood by the west. A major intervention in understanding how popular narratives shape history, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of history, medieval history, history of travel, world literature, postcolonial studies, and general readers interested in travel narratives.


A Bibliography of East European Travel Writing on Europe

A Bibliography of East European Travel Writing on Europe

Author: Wendy Bracewell

Publisher:

Published: 2008-02-10

Total Pages: 608

ISBN-13:

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The bibliography volume of the three-volume East Looks West: East European Travel Writing in Europe collates travel writing published in book form by east Europeans travelling in Europe from ca. 1550 to 2000. It is intended as a fundamental research tool, collecting together travel writings within each national/linguistic tradition, and enabling comparative analysis of such material. It fills an important gap in the existing reference literature, both in western and east European languages, and will be of use to those working in the growing fields of comparative travel writing, regional and national identities, and postcolonialism. These texts exist in surprisingly large numbers, and include writings of high literary quality as well as of historical interest, but they have been relatively little studied as a genre. Much of this material is rare and difficult to find, even in national libraries. As a result, there are few bibliographical surveys of the literature of east European travel and self-representation, and none that are region-wide or comparative in scope. This is the third volume of a three-part set of East Looks West. Vol. 1. Orientations. An Anthology of East European Travel Writing on Europe. Vol. 2. Undern Eastern Eyes. A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe.


Later Middle English Literature, Materiality, and Culture

Later Middle English Literature, Materiality, and Culture

Author: Brian Gastle

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2018-04-12

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1611496772

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The essays in this volume consider the ways in which material and intellectual culture both shaped and were shaped by the literature of late medieval England. The first section, “Textual Material,” reflects on cultural and social issues generally referred to as the History of Ideas, and how those ideas manifest in later medieval English texts. Essays address, for example, affect in The Book of Margery Kempe, rhetoric in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, anarchy in late medieval political texts, and temporality in Gower’s Confessio Amantis. The essays in the second section, “Material Texts,” examine physical objects – from pilgrim badges, to manuscripts, to money, to early printed editions – and the cultural behaviors associated with them, interpreting these objects and exploring their connections to the important literary and political texts of the age such as Piers Plowman, Lydgate’s Troy Book, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. All of the essays in this collection emerge from the relationships and connections between the issues that characterize Jim Dean’s work: the cultural, material, and aesthetic aspects of later medieval English literature. So too do they reflect a movement in medieval literary studies presaged by Dean’s career of scholarship and teaching, that critical approaches to literary texts are best undertaken with an understanding of the complex cultural and historical milieu that defines both the production of those texts and the production of our own work on those texts.


Writing East

Writing East

Author: Iain Macleod Higgins

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9780812233438

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A remarkable analysis of an important medieval text. . . . This work will surely initiate new studies of the precolonial frame of mind and the role of distinct versions of medieval manuscripts in the shaping of medieval understanding.--Sixteenth Century Journal