After visiting Canterbury Cathedral, I was inspired to suggest books that relate to Canterbury’s famous Archbishops, history and beauty.
Leiðarvísir: Its Genre and Sources, with Particular Reference to the Description of Rome
April 13, 2014 By
For the last two centuries, Leiðarvísir has been the subject of great interest by scholars from a variety of disciplines: not only Old Norse scholars, but also historians, geographers, toponymists and scholars of pilgrimage have studied and analysed this work.
Natural conditions in the Carpathian Basin of the middle ages
February 13, 2014 By
The analysis of natural conditions is a new field in Hungarian medieval research. This field could only come into existence with the spread of new sources of research, and with the need of drawing the most realistic picture of medieval living conditions with the help of more – previously ignored – data and facts. This field of research may have a special meaning as according to sources of the age, the Carpathian Basin was one of the natural Paradises of Medieval Europe.
Vespucci’s Triangle and the Shape of the World
January 17, 2014 By
Interdisciplinary interactions between sixteenth-century travellers and cosmographers produced visual models that challenged normative modes of visual thinking, even as they tried to clarify ideas about the earth’s surface.
Land and Sea Communications, Fourth–Fifteenth Centuries
January 16, 2014 By
The principle that the active and coordinated collaboration of nature and man is an essential requirement for the creation of a network of communications is of fundamen- tal importance.
Worldly Unease in Late Medieval European Travel Reports
January 11, 2014 By
Comparing the Book of John Mandeville with Jean de Jeanville’s Vie Saint Louis and William of Rubruck’s Journey, this chapter argues that cosmopolitan perspectives in these texts seem to emerge in spite of rather than because of their contacts with other cultures.
Criminal Behaviour by Pilgrims in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period
January 4, 2014 By
In the early and high Middle Ages, an introspective religiosity was predominant and supported by Benedictine and Cistercian monks; thus, pil- grimages to holy places were neither as popular nor practiced as they were in the period from the late Middle Ages onwards.
Traveler’s Tips from the 14th Century: The Detours of Ibn Battuta
December 22, 2013 By
What advice can Ibn Battuta provide the globe-trotting public of the 21st century?
‘None Shall Pass’: Mental Barriers to Travel in Old English Poetry
September 24, 2013 By
I shall be exploring a xenophobia so extreme that it is a wonder that anyone went anywhere.
A King on the Move: The Place of an Itinerant Court in Charlemagne’s Government
August 7, 2013 By
I shall suggest here that we should abandon this assumed correlation, and that once we have done so, a very different picture of Charlemagne’s itinerary between 768 and 814, and consequently of his government, emerges.
Hosting the king: hospitality and the royal iter in tenth-century England
July 31, 2013 By
Hosting the king: hospitality and the royal iter in tenth-century England Levi Roach (Trinity College, Cambridge) The Journal of Medieval History, 37.1 (March 2011), 34-46 Abstract Traditional studies of royal itinerancy have depended on locating the king’s progress through his kingdom(s) as precisely as possible and it should therefore not surprise that the iter regis […]
Ibn Jubayr: The Rihla
July 19, 2013 By
Abu ‘l-Husayn Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Jubayr (1145-1217) was not an exceptional man. As a relatively ordinary, middle-aged Muslim, Ibn Jubayr was neither the first nor the last to leave Al-Andalus to perform the hajj. Admiring kings only from afar, the closest that Ibn Jubayr came to royalty were encounters with imperial tax collectors. Paradoxically though, it is precisely Ibn Jubayr’s lack of distinction that helped earn him repute throughout the Islamic world in his time. It also makes him the ideal subject of the present study.
Representations of English Women and their Pilgrimages in Twelfth-Century Miracle Collections
June 18, 2013 By
Drawing on a survey of sixteen miracle collections compiled in twelfth-century England, the study examines the representation of women as pilgrims, and demonstrates that many modern assumptions about female travel in the Middle Ages are not consistent with the miracle accounts.
‘Fromm thennes faste he gan avyse/This litel spot of erthe’: GIS and the General Prologue
May 2, 2013 By
This paper was given at the Canada Chaucer Seminar on April 27, 2013.
Here there be no dragons: Maravilla in Two Fifteenth-Century Spanish libros de viajes
April 1, 2013 By
Monsters, anthropomorphs, and marvels are common ingredients in medieval travel literature, and even narratives of real medieval journeys include these creatures, to the delight of the reading audience.
The Legend of the Purgatory of Saint Patrick: From Ireland to Dante and Beyond
March 17, 2013 By
“Yes by Saint Patrick …. Touching this vision here It is an honest ghost, that let me tell you” (Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5)
How parasites went on Crusade
February 12, 2013 By
The contents of crusader latrines are helping researchers probe the history of parasite infections in humans.
Russian Pilgrims in Constantinople
December 30, 2012 By
If one compares the Russian Anthony text with the original Mercati Anonymus text, the longest and most detailed of the three extant contemporary Western descriptions of the shrines of Constantinople, one finds that the Latin text includes only twenty of the seventy-six religious shrines mentioned by the Russian enumeration.
The Cross as Tree: The Wood-of-the-Cross Legends in Middle English and Latin Texts in Medieval England
December 28, 2012 By
The wood-of-the-cross legend is actually a group of narratives that trace the pre- history of the wood used to make Christ’s cross back to Old Testament figures, or in some cases back to paradise itself.
Tolling the Rhine in 1254: Complementary Monopoly Revisited
December 16, 2012 By
Given a demand for Rhine travel, an Emperor faced a classic complementary monopoly problem: how many toll stations to have, where to site them, and what toll to charge at each.
The Swedish Kings in Progress – and the Centre of Power
December 5, 2012 By
Why did the rulers travel! One reason was purely financial: the economy demanded a constant movement of the household. Once the food supplies in one place of abode had been eaten up it was easier to move to a new residence than to transport provisions overlong distances. Mobility contributed to the proper utilization of the produce of manors.
A Peripheral Matter? Oceans in the East in Late Medieval Thought, Report and Cartography
October 21, 2012 By
Focusing in particular on the southern and eastern parts of the Ocean Sea, this article traces the broad contours of a representational and conceptual shift brought about, I argue, by the interplay between geographical thought and social (navigational, mercantile) practice.
Mandeville’s Intolerance: The Contest for Souls and Sacred Sites in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville
October 3, 2012 By
While Chaucer‟s knight has traveled to and fought in Spain, North Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia Minor, Sir John claims to have visited the entire known world from Constantinople and the Holy Land to the farthest reaches of Asia.
Sailing with the Mu’allim: The Technical Practiceof Red Sea Sailing during the Medieval Period
September 30, 2012 By
The status of the Red Sea as a lane of communication be-tween the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean has beenwidely commented upon…The medieval period was no exception to this. The establishment of Mecca as a centre of pilgrimage and theincreasing importance of Cairo both served to provide further motives for seafaring activity along and across theRed Sea.
In Our Time: Marco Polo
August 20, 2012 By
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the celebrated Venetian explorer Marco Polo.
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