The ‘Book’ of Travels: Genre, Ethnology, and Pilgrimage, 1250-1700

The ‘Book’ of Travels: Genre, Ethnology, and Pilgrimage, 1250-1700 PDF Author: Palmira Brummett
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047428447
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
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.

The ‘Book’ of Travels: Genre, Ethnology, and Pilgrimage, 1250-1700

The ‘Book’ of Travels: Genre, Ethnology, and Pilgrimage, 1250-1700 PDF Author: Palmira Brummett
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047428447
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Before Orientalism

Before Orientalism PDF Author: Kim M. Phillips
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812245482
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Drawing on medieval accounts of the earliest European journeys to China, India, Mongolia, and southeast Asia, Before Orientalism explores European attitudes toward Asian eating habits, sexual practices, femininities, and civility, reconstructing a precolonial vision of the East that was often neutral or admiring.

Writing the Holy Land

Writing the Holy Land PDF Author: Michele Campopiano
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030527743
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
The book shows how the Franciscans in Jerusalem in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries wrote works which standardized the cultural memory of the Holy Land. The experience of the late medieval Holy Land was deeply connected to the presence of the Franciscans of the Convent of Mount Zion in Jerusalem, who welcomed and guided pilgrims. This book analyses this construction of a shared memory based on the continuous availability of these texts in the Franciscan library of Mount Zion, where they were copied and adapted to respond to new historical contexts. This book shows how the Franciscans developed a representation of the Holy Land by elaborating on its history and describing its religious groups and the geography of the region. This representation circulated among pilgrims and influenced how contemporaries imagined the Holy Land

Europeans Abroad, 1450–1750

Europeans Abroad, 1450–1750 PDF Author: David Ringrose
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442251778
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
This innovative book looks beyond the traditional history of European expansion—which highlights European conquests, empire building, and hegemony—in order to explore the more human and realistic dimensions of European experiences abroad. David Ringrose argues that Early Modern Europe was relatively poor and that its industrial and military technology, while distinctive in some ways, was not obviously superior to that of Africa or Asia. As a result, the interaction between Europeans abroad and the peoples they met was vastly different from the relationship created by the economic and military imperialism of the post-1750 Industrial Revolution. Instead, the author depicts it as a process of cultural interaction, collaboration, and assimilation, masked by narratives of European conquest or assertion of control. Ringrose convincingly shows that Europeans who went abroad before 1700 engaged in an exchange of cross-cultural contact and has framed the process in its own time rather than as the precursor of what came later. Then, as now, historical actors knew nothing of the unexpected consequences of their actions.

The Chinese Language in European Texts

The Chinese Language in European Texts PDF Author: Dinu Luca
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137502916
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
This detailed, chronological study investigates the rise of the European fascination with the Chinese language up to 1615. By meticulously investigating a wide range of primary sources, Dinu Luca identifies a rhetorical continuum uniting the land of the Seres, Cathay, and China in a tropology of silence, vision, and writing. Tracing the contours of this tropology, The Chinese Language in European Texts: The Early Period offers close readings of language-related contexts in works by classical authors, medieval travelers, and Renaissance cosmographers, as well as various merchants, wanderers, and missionaries, both notable and lesser-known. What emerges is a clear and comprehensive understanding of early European ideas about the Chinese language and writing system.

Sacred Journeys in the Counter-Reformation

Sacred Journeys in the Counter-Reformation PDF Author: Elizabeth C. Tingle
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501514385
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Sacred Journeys in the Counter-Reformation examines long-distance pilgrimages to ancient, international shrines in northwestern Europe in the two centuries after Luther. In this region in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, saints’ cults and pilgrimage were frequently contested, more so than in the Mediterranean world. France, the Low Countries and the British Isles were places of disputation and hostility between Protestant and Catholic; sacred landscapes and journeys came under attack and in some regions, were outlawed by the state. Taking as case studies hugely popular medieval shrines such as Compostela, the Mont Saint-Michel and Lough Derg, the impact of Protestant criticism and Catholic revival on shrines, pilgrims’ motives and experiences is examined through life writings, devotional works and institutional records. The central focus is that of agency in religious change: what drove spiritual reform and what were its consequences for the ‘ordinary’ Catholic? This is explored through concepts of the religious self, holy materiality, and sacred space.

Travel Writings on Asia

Travel Writings on Asia PDF Author: Christian Mueller
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811901244
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
This open access book provides an analysis of human actors and their capacity to explore and conceptualise their own agency by being curious, gathering knowledge, and shaping identities in their travel reflections on Asia. Thus, the actors open windows across time to present a profound overview of diverse descriptions and constructions of Asia. It is demonstrated that international and transnational history contributes to and benefits from analyses of national and local contexts that in turn enrich our understanding of transcultural encounters and experiences across time. The book proposes an actor-centred contextual approach to travel writing to recount meaningful constructions of Asia’s physical, political and spiritual landscapes. It offers comparative reflections on the patterns of encounter across Eurasia, where from the late medieval period an idea of civilisation was transculturally shared yet also constantly questioned and reframed. Tailored for academic and public discussions alike, this volume will be invaluable for both scholars of Global History and interested audiences to stimulate further discussions on the nature of global encounters in Asia.

Mapping the Ottomans

Mapping the Ottomans PDF Author: Palmira Brummett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316300250
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
Simple paradigms of Muslim-Christian confrontation and the rise of Europe in the seventeenth century do not suffice to explain the ways in which European mapping envisioned the 'Turks' in image and narrative. Rather, maps, travel accounts, compendia of knowledge, and other texts created a picture of the Ottoman Empire through a complex layering of history, ethnography, and eyewitness testimony, which juxtaposed current events to classical and biblical history; counted space in terms of peoples, routes, and fortresses; and used the land and seascapes of the map to assert ownership, declare victory, and embody imperial power's reach. Enriched throughout by examples of Ottoman self-mapping, this book examines how Ottomans and their empire were mapped in the narrative and visual imagination of early modern Europe's Christian kingdoms. The maps serve as centerpieces for discussions of early modern space, time, borders, stages of travel, information flows, invocations of authority, and cross-cultural relations.

Memory before Modernity

Memory before Modernity PDF Author: Erika Kuijpers
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004261257
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
This volume examines the practice of memory in early modern Europe, showing that this was already a multimedia affair with many political uses, and affecting people at all levels of society; many pre-modern memory practices persist until today.

Journeys and Destinations

Journeys and Destinations PDF Author: Alex Norman
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443850055
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Journeys and Destinations: Studies in Travel, Identity, and Meaning brings together scholarship from diverse fields all focused on either practices of journeying, or destinations to which such journeys lead. Common across the contributions herein are threads that indicate travel as a core component — as a concept or a practice — of the fabric of identity and meaning.