Medieval Travel Writing

This course studies travel writing across the medieval world. Focusing on major types of medieval travelers—such as court ladies, pilgrims, envoys, warriors, merchants, knights, and beggars—and their documented travel experience, this course explores different modes of writing mobility and its constraints, addressing issues of knowledge production, boundaries of self, religiosity, (pre-)modernity, and colonialism. The questions we ask include: how did medieval writers fashion “self” and “others” in their travel accounts? How were gender dynamics articulated and negotiated when female travelers confronted society constraints on their mobility? How was violence instrumentalized to render the “mobile” into the “immobile”? Was there value in “stillness”? And broadly, how did the movement of body challenge the established cultural and epistemological norms? We engage with primary materials as diverse as diaries, poetry, official reports, travel accounts, historiography, and novels, and geographically span Japan, China, Byzantium, and Western Europe. By examining literary texts on shared themes across different cultural traditions, this course also encourages students to think deeply the value of juxtaposition and to reflect deeply on the implications and possibilities of the “global Middle Ages.”