The Medieval Invention of Travel

317 Pages·2017·1.905 MB·English

by  Shayne Aaron Legassie

the medieval invention of travel

the medieval invention of travel
shayne aaron legassie
the university of chicago press
chicago and london
publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the
bevington fund.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2017 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
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Published 2017
Printed in the United States of America
26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 44256- 3 (cloth)
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 44662- 2 (paper)
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 44273- 0 (e- book)
doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226442730.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging- in-P ublication Data
Names: Legassie, Shayne, 1979– author.
Title: The medieval invention of travel / Shayne Aaron Legassie.
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2016040300 | isbn 9780226442563 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn
9780226446622 (pbk. : alk. paper) | isbn 9780226442730 (e- book)
Subjects: lcsh: Travel writing— Europe, Western— History—To 1500. | Travel
in literature. | Literature, Medieval— History and criticism. | Pilgrims and
pilgrimages in literature.
Classification: lcc pn56.t7 l44 2017 | ddc 809/.93320902— dc23 lc record
available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016040300
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48- 1992 (Permanence
of Paper).
contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Travail and Travel Writing 1
Part One: Subjectivity, Authority, and the “Exotic” 19
1. Exoticism as the Appropriation of Travail 21
2. Travail and Authority in the Forgotten Age of Discovery 59
Part Two: Pilgrimage as Literate Labor 95
3. Memory Work and the Labor of Writing 99
4. The Pilgrim as Investigator 141
Part Three: Discovering the Proximate 165
5. Becoming Petrarch 169
6. The Chivalric Mediterranean of Pero Tafur 203
Coda: Beyond 1500; or, Travel’s Labor’s Lost 227
Notes 231
Index 289
v

preface
Phrased in very broad terms, the central contention of The Medieval In-
vention of Travel is that scholars have underestimated the significance
of travel— as both material practice and philosophical abstraction— to the
development of medieval travel writing. Though this book draws on ear-
lier and later evidence, it focuses primarily on the years 1200– 1500. During
these three centuries, travel writing burgeoned and diversified to a degree
that has no historical precedent. This remarkable literary flourishing shaped
and was shaped by the period’s evolving attitudes toward human mobil-
ity. This vital observation has been relegated to the background of previous
scholarship, to the detriment of one of the most complex and consequential
eras in the history of Western ideas about travel.
For three decades, medieval travel writing has been the focus of consis-
tently path- breaking research. Concerned primarily with questions of geo-
ethno graphic representation, most broad-r anging treatments of the topic
have compared how different travel writers represent a particular region
of the world. Several major contributions have discussed “exotic” travel
accounts written by European visitors to East Asia, including the well-
known works of Marco Polo, William of Rubruck, and John Mandeville. A
second group of studies has shed light on the richness and variety of texts
written by medieval pilgrims to the Holy Land, a corpus once dismissed as
an unremarkable monolith. More recently (and far less comprehensively),
scholars have begun to turn their attention to individual accounts of late
medieval travel within Europe and the Mediterranean. For the most part,
these three lines of inquiry have developed independently of one another.
While there is much to commend this “area studies” approach to medi-
eval travel writing, there is also cause to question its unexamined and near-
total dominance. It is certainly true that, in many cases, medieval readers
vii
viii preface
adopted a similar, geographically based logic in their classification of travel
writing. Not surprisingly, the pilgrim who decided to write about his jour-
ney to Jerusalem was also likely to consult previous texts related to the
Holy Land; the traveler who wished to write about a sojourn in India or
China would likewise search out works about those regions of the world.
That said, lines of authorial influence and habits of manuscript compila-
tion suggest that, over the course of the long fourteenth century, the desti-
nation of the traveler became a less salient consideration in the way that
travel writing was classified. Increasingly, accounts by “exotic” travel writ-
ers, Jerusalem pilgrims, and Mediterranean/European wayfarers are seen as
sharing a common characteristic: they are the products of travel in the ab-
stract. This emergent intuition marks a consequential turning point in the
development of medieval ideas about human mobility and its relationship
to literacy— one whose origins and implications cannot be apprehended
without reading across modern scholarly canons.
Between 1200 and 1500, the authors and audiences of travel writing
were engaged in what amounts to a prolonged cultural debate about the
individual and collective benefits of voyages to various parts of the world.
Out of this chaotic, multicentered, and open- ended discussion emerged a
nebulous consensus with profound implications: a new, enduring view of
travel as literate labor. In its guise as literate labor, travel was increasingly
understood as an ennobling, taxing form of work, at once physical and intel-
lectual, practicable in just about any place in the world, with intimate ties
to the arts of literacy.
The medieval invention of travel- as- literate- labor was, at its core, a re-
invention of classical ideals. In antiquity, heroism in travel was associated
primarily with the exercise of self- mastery in the face of bodily temptation
and travail. In the Middle Ages, the prestige-g enerating journey came to be
understood as both a triumph over the flesh and—a t the same time— as an
intellectual enterprise, oriented toward the production of written knowl-
edge. As travel writing became a more prominent feature of the medi-
eval cultural landscape, the heroic traveler distinguished himself through
regimes of self- discipline that incorporated, or modeled themselves after,
practices of reading and writing.
By evoking the rhetorical concept of inventio— the process of dis-
covering the contours of one’s subject matter or the framework of one’s
argument— the title of this book hopes to underscore the open-e nded
nature of the medieval invention of travel, as well as the role that literacy
of various kinds played in the formulation and rationalization of new, pres-
tigious modes of mobility. The medieval invention of travel was a largely
preface ix
improvisational process that did not converge upon a single prescriptive
model. Indeed, rather than resulting in a homogeneous approach to explor-
ing and writing about the world, the reimagination of travel as literate labor
ushered in an era of dazzling new possibilities. The story of late medieval
travel writing is one in which destinations once deemed too familiar or un-
remarkable to comment on are subjected to the kinds of detailed analysis
previously reserved for distant Asian kingdoms and sacred religious cen-
ters. It is, moreover, a story in which the clerical monopoly on intellectual
authority is challenged by social actors once excluded from the production
of official geoethnographic knowledge. Importantly, it is also the story of
how a variety of literate dispositions and practices— academic, devotional,
literary, and bureaucratic— were absorbed into the status- enhancing labor
of travel, giving rise to novel methods of geoethnographic investigation and
new opportunities for elite self- fashioning. Among the postmedieval prac-
tices heralded by medieval travel writers are: the antiquarian and ecologi-
cal investigation of the Mediterranean; the French- Italian axis of the Grand
Tour; and the value- laden distinction between travel and tourism.
In pursuing the central thread of its argument, then, The Medieval In-
vention of Travel necessarily calls for a reevaluation of the place currently
assigned to the Middle Ages in historical surveys of travel writing. To many
historiographers, medieval travelers are objects of envy and scorn. Dis-
missed as half-b aked models of their modern counterparts, or as the impos-
sibly lucky inhabitants of an age in which travel furnished an unthinkable
sense of wholeness and satisfaction, “the medieval traveler” is seldom seen
as relevant to our world.
A thoroughgoing rebuttal of these stereotypes must start by correcting
a historiographical error native to medieval studies. A dubious piece of con-
ventional wisdom holds that, in the history of travel writing, the period
spanning 1350 to 1492 is— to quote Joan- Pau Rubiés— one of “relative stag-
nation.”1 This opinion is diametrically opposed to readily observable reali-
ties. Between 1350 and 1492, Latin Christians not only continued to write
about their travels in Persia, India, and other parts of Asia, they also—a nd
not insignificantly— documented journeys to places within Europe and the
Mediterranean that they had never bothered to write about before. More-
over, the majority of extant copies of travel accounts written before 1350
were actually produced after 1350, during this so-c alled period of “stagna-
tion.” Many of these manuscripts altered the texts that they preserve in re-
sponse to ongoing debates about travel and travel writing. The fifteenth cen-
tury also yielded a historically unprecedented crop of travel accounts about
the Holy Land. This varied and innovative corpus is almost always studied