Chivalry and Exploration 1298-1630

TLDR

Explorers from Marco Polo to Captain John Smith interpreted their voyages through the lens of medieval knighthood literature, yet historians have largely overlooked this cultural link. The study develops the idea that chivalric romance serves as an imaginative literature of travel, tracing its publication alongside exploration narratives to reveal parallel themes. The author illustrates this by mapping the histories of explorers—Marco Polo, Captain John Smith, Gadifer de la Salle, Prince Henry the Navigator, Cortés, Hakluyt, and Sir Walter Raleigh—to their chivalric connections.

Abstract

Explorers from Marco Polo to Captain John Smith viewed their travels and discoveries in the light of attitudes they absorbed from the literature of medieval knighthood. Their own accounts, and contemporary narratives (reinforced by the interest of early printers), reveal this interplay, but historians of exploration on the one hand, and of chivalry on the other, have largely ignored this cultural connection. Jennifer Goodman convincingly develops the idea of the chivalric romance as an imaginative literature of travel; she traces the publication of medieval chivalric texts alongside exploration narratives throughout the later middle ages and renaissance, and reveals parallel themes and preoccupations. She illustrates this with the histories of a sequence of explorers and their links with chivalry, from Marco Polo to Captain John Smith, and including Gadifer de la Salle and his expedition to the Canary Islands, Prince Henry the Navigator, Cortes, Hakluyt, and Sir Walter Raleigh. JENNIFER GOODMAN teaches at Texas A & M University.