Medieval English Travel: A Critical Anthology

Abstract

When we think of medieval travel, we may first envision the penitential paths that crisscrossed Europe, leading pilgrims to Rome, Santiago de Compostela, or Jerusalem. Yet, as Anthony Bale and Sebastian Sobecki's new critical anthology, Medieval English Travel, reminds us, English travel in the later Middle Ages was motivated by a range of impulses—sacred, commercial, diplomatic, and exploratory—and written about in often wildly divergent ways. Travel writing, as the editors approach it, is a capacious mode rather than a bounded genre; it includes both texts that “narrate movement to and through places,” taking travel as a theme, and texts that chart imagined or inner journeys, where “the journey is the text and vice versa” (2). This volume's expansive treatment of medieval travel writing with its focus on primary sources is a welcome addition to the burgeoning field of scholarship in the area, much of which has sought to broaden our view of how, where, and why medieval people ventured abroad. To this field, which is often global in scope, it brings a regional focus, looking specifically at the literary productions of English travelers in the later Middle Ages.Indeed, Medieval English Travel represents the first effort, to my knowledge, to gather the primary sources of premodern English travel into a single volume, aiming to open up this corpus of texts to new audiences. In this, it is a boon to those of us who teach courses on medieval travel and who are often challenged to find editions or compilations that represent the diversity of the period's travel writing. While we can assign the entirety of Mandeville's Travels or the Book of Margery Kempe, and perhaps draw excerpts on pilgrimage from Brett Whalen's wide-ranging reader, Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages, we usually have little option other than to create our own digital anthologies or course packs to include many other texts, which can sometimes be difficult to acquire. Excerpts from an impressive selection of such texts are here brought together for the first time and presented alongside lesser-known texts, all of which are prefaced by a series of introductory essays by experts on late-medieval travel.The anthology is divided into three parts: the first contains six short essays that contextualize medieval English travel from various perspectives; the second, which comprises the heart of the volume, includes the primary texts and excerpts from medieval English travel writing; and the final section, called “Contexts,” contains brief bibliographies for further reading on related topics. Bale and Sobecki's excellent introduction surveys the major elements of medieval travel writing, offering some general definitions of the category that emphasize the sense of place, treatments of landscape and geography, and the shaping forces of commerce, war and diplomacy, curiosity, and spiritual journey. The following six essays develop these perspectives, offering short surveys of key topics relevant to any study of travel writing: real and imagined places (Bale), maps (Alfred Hiatt), cross-cultural encounters (Matthew Boyd Goldie), languages (Jonathan Hsy), trade (Sobecki), and politics and diplomacy (Joanna Bellis). Taken together, these introductory essays provide a multifaceted and accessible overview of the main reasons for travel, attitudes toward those encountered on travels, and challenges that medieval English travelers would have faced. The essays fall neatly into pairs, moving from textual and visual representations of travel, to how these texts represented difference, to some of the key motivations for secular travel in the period.The opening pair of essays focus on how ideas about place circulated in texts and images. In the first, Anthony Bale explores the textuality of medieval pilgrimage narratives and itineraries that described “real” and “imagined” places and journeys. Bale focuses primarily on how the late-fifteenth-century account by William Brewyn maps spiritual meanings onto his physical journey to Rome and the Holy Land, drawing on both firsthand experience and reading. Noting the multiple origins and purposes of medieval travel writing, Bale reads Brewyn's narrative as “both a record of travel and of reading … a personal record of a journey and a guide for others to make their journey” (21). The volume's second contextual essay, Alfred Hiatt's “Maps and the Organization of Space,” considers the spatial and ideological dimensions of cartography. Moving from the rise of mappa mundi in England from the twelfth century to sea charts of the fifteenth century, the essay considers the ways that maps evolved to incorporate changing knowledge of geography and the natural world. The essay helpfully includes images of several of the maps it considers.The next two essays examine how travel writing characterizes difference: cultural, religious, and linguistic. First, Matthew Boyd Goldie's treatment of cross-cultural encounters explores how Christian writers from the West represented cultural and religious difference. Focusing on Mandeville's Travels, Goldie considers not only how travel writing demonstrates cultural biases, condemnation, fear, and anxiety about religious and cultural difference, as we might expect, but also reveals interest, wonder, and curiosity, and even, at points, uses cultural difference as an opportunity to turn the critical gaze back on the West. Moving from cultural and religious to linguistic difference, Jonathan Hsy's chapter, “Codes and Languages,” considers another type of difficulty that lay English travelers would have in foreign journeys: communication. Drawing examples from the Book of Margery Kempe, the Itineraries of William Wey, and language instruction manuals, Hsy suggests that although evidence for how English travelers dealt with other languages is rare, when available it can offer an important perspective on both the challenges of travel and on language development itself.The final two chapters focus on what might be called secular travel, looking at trade and warfare. Sobecki's “Trade and Exchange” examines England's trade from a variety of perspectives, discussing the Hanseatic league, the wool and textile trades (as England's main exports), and even the exchange of books, suggesting that in transporting goods, merchants also facilitated a trade in ideas. Likewise, as Joanna Bellis shows in the anthology's final short essay on “Politics and Diplomacy,” warfare facilitated intellectual and cultural exchange, as Englishmen traveled abroad as soldiers. This persistent reason for medieval travel drew English soldiers and diplomats to Ireland, Scotland, France, as well as to more distant shores. Such diplomatic journeys, she notes, generated a particularly political form of “travel writing,” commemorated in chronicles, romances, and political poems. As I hope this overview has suggested, each of these brief chapters is usefully summative and serves as a helpful guide for readers new to this material.The central part of the volume is comprised of twenty-six English texts, many of them excerpted from longer works. Taken together, these selections paint a picture of a medieval world on the move. Many of these texts are those we might expect to find in an anthology of English travel writing—such as selections from Mandeville and the Margery Kempe. Most, however, are from lesser known works, such as excerpts from Trevisa's Polychronicon, pilgrim itineraries, documents, wills, guidebooks, chronicles, romances, and mystical “virtual pilgrimages” (such as those in Bridget of Sweden's Revelations). Journeys to Rome and Jerusalem are especially well represented here, but the volume also includes imaginative accounts of spiritual or marvelous travel, and several medieval treatments of geography and cartography. Because, as the introduction notes, English travel writing only begins to proliferate with the development of pilgrimage routes in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the volume focuses primary on Middle English writing.The editors have arranged the selections chronologically beginning with a translation of Saewulf's account of his voyages to Jerusalem at the beginning of the twelfth century and concluding with Richard Torkington's early sixteenth-century Diaries of Englysshe Travell. While some of the volume's texts have been drawn from earlier editions, a significant number have been newly edited from medieval manuscripts for this anthology. These include many texts edited by Bale and Sobecki, which range from Robert of Gloucester's Metrical Chronicle of the Third Crusade to travelers' itineraries that list stops on the way to Jerusalem and Florence, as well as three texts edited by other scholars: a description of the world from Book I of John Trevisa's translation of the Polychronicon, edited by Julia Boffey; the complete fifty-five-line geographical poem, The Division of the World, edited by A. S. G. Edwards; and a selection from John Pagge's fifteenth-century Siege of Rouen, edited by Joanna Bellis. Each entry is prefaced with a brief headnote that provides some background material, information about the text, manuscript context or publication history, and a short bibliography. The third and final part of the volume, “Contexts” provides a set of thematically organized bibliographies for the teacher or the advanced student of these texts.As a teacher of courses on medieval pilgrimage and journey literature who often laments the lack of an anthology on these subjects, I hoped that Medieval English Travel would be the classroom text I have long been waiting for. In some ways it is, but it is rather more appropriate for advanced scholars working on medieval travel writing. The anthology offers an unparalleled breadth and diversity of primary sources in medieval English; it also includes a compelling set of introductory essays, which offer an insightful bird's-eye view of the field. But, while the headnotes to the entries also provide useful information, relatively little is included there about the larger contexts of the works or the major interpretive issues. Likewise, the editing of the primary texts will likely present some challenges for readers new to Middle English. A more thorough glossing might have made the volume more student friendly, since undergraduate medieval travel writing classes often include undergraduates encountering Middle English for the first time. The anthology would, however, be an excellent resource for graduate students and graduate seminars, with one caveat: while the editors intend to make early English travel writings “accessible to a modern audience and a wide readership” (xiii), currently priced at $115, the hardcover book may be too expensive to justify inclusion in many courses. The release of a more affordable paperback edition of the book would go a long way in helping achieve the editors' articulated aims. Yet, even if its classroom uses are somewhat more limited than they might be, the volume will surely shape the scholarship of medieval travel, especially insofar as it invites consideration of understudied texts and documents. As a whole, this timely collection offers a treasure trove of primary sources that will help us better understand what medieval English people knew about the rest of the world, what they thought about it, and how they gained this knowledge or belief.