The Cambridge Guide to Global Medieval Travel Writing

The Middle Ages laid the foundations for the long European and Middle Eastern history of voyaging, colonialism, and expansion: the Papal embassies that took over a year of overland travel to reach Mongolia, Ibn Battuta's thirty years of voyaging to Africa and East Asia, or the arrival of European colonialism in the Americas. With a focus on medieval Europe, this is the first book to cover global medieval travel writing from Iceland to Indonesia, providing unrivalled insight into the experiences of early travellers. Paying special attention to race, gender and manuscript culture, the volume's vast geographical and linguistic range provides expert coverage of Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Chinese literature. An essential resource for teaching and research, the collection challenges established views of the Middle Ages and Western ideas of history.

'Astonishingly ambitious in scope, judiciously planned and delivered, each chapter in this collection illuminates something new and invites us to look afresh at premodern travel writing on a global scale – a magnificent achievement.' Nandini Das, Professor of Early Modern English Literature and Culture, University of Oxford
'A rich account of medieval travel writing, reorienting in the fullest sense: in Europe and the Middle East authors find ground from which to fan out – to Asia, Africa, and beyond; to histories that make the most urgent claim on our attention as scholars of the global medieval past.' Alexandra Gillespie, Professor of English and Medieval Studies, University of Toronto
'This is a path-breaking collection, offering a rich panorama of medieval travel and travel-writing. Its wide-ranging coverage encompasses the areas known to European and Middle Eastern travellers, from Rus' to Mecca, and from Ireland to China. It will be the first port of call for everyone interested in medieval travel.' Nora Berend, Professor of European History, University of Cambridge
'This impressive study presents the work of nearly 40 scholars, each representing a specific premodern locality and set of cultural contexts. Sobecki's collection will be an invaluable research and teaching resource, offering excellent background for premodern global study in the classroom, an enormous bibliographical treasure trove for research, and thought-provoking source for scholars exploring network-centered cultures and premodern race, religion, gender, and globalisation.' Suzanne Yeager, Professor of English and Medieval Studies, Fordham University, Rose Hill Campus
'A wonderful collection of some of the finest travel writing by some of the greatest writers in history – and better still, from all around the world. A treasure trove of information, anecdotes and insights, brought together in a single volume. A delight.' Peter Frankopan, Professor of Global History, Oxford University
'With a dual focus on Islamicate Asia and Africa alongside Latin Europe, this ambitious and finely researched volume moves to redress the Eurocentric legacies of the “medieval” and its histories of travel writing. Assembling cutting-edge scholarly expertise on an expansive array of geographies and their description, The Cambridge Guide to Global Medieval Travel Writing makes for an essential and exciting new entry in the bibliographies of medieval travel writing and the Global Middle Ages.' Shirin A. Khanmohamadi, Professor of Comparative Literature, San Francisco State University
'This rich, expansive volume encompasses wide-ranging critical approaches and methodologies related to medieval travel literature, whether literary history, theoretical frameworks, or area-based studies. It affords salient points of comparison across cultures and traditions in a renewed and widened view of the medieval world-essential for scholarly research and crucial for teaching.' Ruen-chuan Ma, Associate Professor of English and Literature, Utah Valley University

Sebastian Sobecki is Professor of Later Medieval English Literature at the University of Toronto. His forthcoming books include The Cambridge History of London Literature: Vol. 1, The Oxford Handbook of Middle English Prose, and two volumes for the Oxford edition of Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, 1598-1600. He is also working with Elizaveta Strakhov and Misty Schieberle on a monograph on the reception of Christine de Pizan in England.

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