Brill The Book of Travels: Genre, Ethnology, and Pilgrimage, 1250-1700 (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions): 140

This collection assesses genre, ethnology, and pilgrimage in a set of disparate travel narratives spanning the medieval to early modern eras. It assesses the possibilities for cultural translation as travelers witness, craft, and imagine desired, fearful, and sacred lands. From the Back Cover The early modern era is often envisioned as one in which European genres, both narrative and visual, diverged indelibly from those of medieval times. This collection examines a disparate set of travel texts, dating from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, to question that divergence and to assess the modes, themes, and ethnologies of travel writing. It demonstrates the enduring nature of the itinerary, the variant forms of witnessing (including imaginary maps), the crafting of sacred space as a cautionary tale, and the use of the travel narrative to represent the transformation of the authorial self. Focusing on European travelers to the expansive East, from the soft architecture of Timur's tent palaces in Samarqand to the ambiguities of sexual identity at the Mughul court, these essays reveal the possibilities for cultural translation as travelers of varying experience and attitude confront remote and foreign (or not so foreign) space. About the Author Palmira Brummett, Ph.D. (1988) in History, University of Chicago, is Professor of History at the University of Tenessee. Her work focuses on the rhetorics of cross-cultural encounter in the Afro-Eurasian oikumene.