Remapping Travel Narratives, 1000-1700: To the East and Back Again

Description

With a specific focus on travel narratives, this collection looks at how Islamic and eastern cultural threads were weaved, through travel and trading networks, into Western European/Christian visual culture and discourse and, ultimately, into the artistic explosion which has been labeled the "Renaissance." Scholars from across humanities disciplines examine Islamic, Jewish, Spanish, Italian, and English works from a truly comparative and non-parochial perspective, to explore the transfer through travel of cultural and religious values and artistic and scientific practices, from the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries.[-]During this period travel, military conquest and trade through the Mediterranean placed Western European citizens and merchants in contact with Islamic and eastern technology and culture, and travel narratives illustrate the converging and pragmatic dynamics of cultural acceptance. Perhaps the spread of "Renaissance" values and beliefs might have followed a trajectory the reverse of what is generally assumed, and that salient aspects of Renaissance culture traveled from the fringes of Islamic and eastern cultures to the midst of hegemonically Christian polities. Contents List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: Travel as episteme—an Introductory Journey • Montserrat Piera Part I. Transforming the rihla Tradition: The Search for Knowledge in Jewish, Muslim, and Christian Travellers 1. From Pious Journeys to the Critique of Sovereignty: Khaqani Shirvani’s Persianate Poetics of Pilgrimage • Rebecca Gould 2. Observing Ziyara in Two Medieval Muslim Travel Accounts • Janet Sorrentino 3. Vulnerable Medieval Iberian Travellers: Benjamin of Tudela’s Sefer ha-Massa’ot, Pero Tafur’s Andanças e viajes, and Ahmad al-Wazzan’s Libro de la Cosmogrophia et Geographia de Africa • Montserrat Piera Part II. Imagining the East: Egypt, Persia, and Istanbul in My Mind 4. “Tierras de Egipto”: Imagined Journeys to the East in the Early Vernacular Literature of Medieval Iberia • Matthew V. Desing 5. The Petrification of Rostam: Thomas Herbert’s Re-vision of Persia in A Relation of Some Yeares Travaile • Nedda Mehdizadeh 6. Between Word and Image: Representations of Shi‘ite Rituals in the Safavid Empire from Early Modern European Travel Accounts • Elio Brancaforte 7. Visions and Transitions of a Pilgrimage of Curiosity: Pietro Della Valle’s Travel to Istanbul (1614–1615) • Sezim Sezer Darnault, Aygül Ağir Part III. To the East and Back: Exchanging Objects, Ideas, and Texts 8. Gift-giving in the Carpini Expedition to Mongolia (1246–1248 CE) • Adriano Duque 9. The East–West Trajectory of Sephardic Sectarianism: From Ibn Daud to Spinoza • Gregory B. Kaplan 10. Piety and Piracy: The Repatriation of the Arm of St. Francis Xavier • Maria del Pilar Ryan 11. The Other Woman: The Geography of Exclusion inThe Knight of Malta (1618) • Ambereen Dadabhoy 12. Experiential Knowledge and the Limits of Merchant Credit • Julia Schleck Selected Bibliography Index