“Travel in the Middle Ages, it goes without saying, differs considerably from its twenty-first-century counterpart,” Jean-François Kosta-Théfaine notes in the introduction to this compelling collection of essays. “Even so, similarities persist across the centuries—especially the writing or iconographical representations found in travelogues, [and] the fact that travel leads to discovery of the other and the elsewhere. . . . The topics [explored in] this book . . . could also quite easily be discussed in works dealing with other, different centuries, including our own. This is a sign, if one more were needed, of the modernity of the Middle Ages.”

The interdisciplinary and international affiliations of the contributors to Travels and Travelogues in the Middle Ages correspond to the collection’s eclectic approach to the field of medieval travel literature. The sampling of travelers and authors studied herein include Marco Polo, Odoric of Pordenome, Margery Kempe, and Benedict of Poland; lands visited and imagined in their works range from Italy to Song dynasty China, from Mongolia to the Arabian desert, and even to the fictional realm of hell as it was imagined in the Middle Ages. The multiplicity of terrains, both literary and geographic, covered in this volume draw upon medieval and current concepts of iconography, ethnography, and the relation of self to other, conveying a broad cultural-historical critical sensibility that will appeal to scholars of medieval religion, philosophical, literature, and art history.