the title Itinerarium in manuscripts, but it would be futile to pin great significance to contemporary titles given that they vary so much from one manuscript to another. More than half the works pay little or no attention to the subjective experience of travel. On what grounds, then, are they labeled “travel writing” here, and would medieval readers have viewed them as having anything in common?
The new interdisciplinary field of “travel writing studies” has put some energy into defining travel writing as a genre and asks whether it is indeed a genre at all. There is some agreement that works so named should contain matter drawn from actual or imagined journeys, even though in some cases the journey itself is not described. The style or form in which that content is expressed may, however, vary substantially and include itineraries or travelogues, letters, diaries, guidebooks, and geographic, ethnographic, or chorographic description.1 Does “genre” refer primarily to the style of text or its thematic content? Hans Robert Jauss’s concept of “horizon of expectations” would encompass both, but in the case of travel writing it seems unproductive to focus too much on form.2 Joan-Pau Rubiés, a specialist in late medieval and Renaissance travel writing, focuses on content in offering a flexible yet precise definition:
[Travel literature] can be defined as that varied body of writing which, whether its principal purpose is practical or fictional, takes travel as an essential element for its production. Travel is therefore not necessarily a theme, nor even a structuring element, within the body of literature generated by travel. … The crucial point is that the writer, who could easily be an armchair writer, ultimately relied on the materials and authority of first-hand travelers.3
This capacious formulation has the virtue of applicability to travel texts from any era or cultural context and is better suited to describing late medieval travel writing than definitions suggested by specialists in modern travel books. It does not require “travel writing” to provide a descriptive first-person account of a journey undertaken, for example, as Jan Borm and Tim Youngs do:
[Travel writing] is not a genre, but a collective term for a variety of texts both predominantly fictional and non-fictional whose main theme is travel. … [The travel book is] any narrative characterized by a non-fiction dominant that relates (almost always) in the first person a journey or journeys that the reader supposes to have taken place in reality while assuming or presupposing that author, narrator and principal character are but one or identical.4
[T]ravel narrative is always controlled by the first person singular. Predictably, therefore, questions of identity are frequently to the fore, suggesting the degree to which physical travel often tends, in its writing, to become symbolic of interior journeys of the mind or soul.5
Mary B. Campbell, one of medieval travel writing’s greatest interpreters, also makes the subjective perspective a definitive element: “Travel literature is defined here as a kind of first-person narrative, or at least a second-person narrative (as in the travel guide: ‘thence you come to a pillar near the chamber of the holy sepulchre’).”6 As her example indicates, the personal viewpoint is a common feature of medieval pilgrimage literature.7
While many late medieval travel texts dealing with the distant East do involve a first-person narrator who undertook a journey, or pretended to have done so, some take the form of a descriptio of distant lands more than an itinerarium through them. This is particularly the case for Ricold’s Liber peregrinacionis (despite its title), Hetoum’s La flor des estoires de la terre d’Orient, Jordan’s Mirabilia descripta, “Le livre de l’estat du Grant Caan,” and Poggio’s account of Niccolò dei Conti’s observations, but even Marco Polo’s book is more chorography than travelogue.8 Pegolotti undertook no journey himself, yet his account of the merchant’s route to Asia can be understood as “travel writing” according to Rubiés’s definition as it is based on information provided by travelers. The odd one out among the items discussed in this book is the anonymous Letter of Prester John, which is not known to be based on the testimony of actual travelers. Despite its lack of perfect fit with Rubiés’s classificatory scheme, the Letter’s later influence determines its inclusion.
The matter of a travel narrative’s truth status is more vexed for medieval texts. In modern travel-writing studies, whether or not a narrative is actually true—or, rather, has its basis in lived experience and observation—is not so relevant; what matters most is that readers generally believe in its veracity. In Borm’s words, a “referential pact” exists between author and reader. The “horizon of expectations” (in Jauss’s famous phrase) a reader brings to a work of travel writing includes the belief that it is based to a degree on real experience.9 Scott D. Westrem concurs that “the success of a travel book depends on a thread of faith extending from narrator to audience. Only when a traveler’s experience is accepted at least tentatively as legitimate can travel’s lessons—whether meant to be informative or entertaining—be learned.”10 But as we saw in Chapter 2, medieval accounts of the distant East were widely but not invariably seen as authentic. It is perhaps better to set aside the requirement for credibility in drawing tentative lines around what we might count as medieval travel writing.
One way to address the question of whether medieval audiences would have perceived the texts gathered here as having anything in common is to look at their manuscript contexts. While sometimes the longer works, especially the Divisament, are found alone in their bindings, they were much more often bound up with several other texts of our interest. To take a handful of examples from dozens of potential exempla, Bern, Burgerbibliothek Cod. 125 contains French versions of Marco Polo, Mandeville, Odoric, “L’estat du Grant Caan,” Hetoum, and Ricold along with William of Boldensele’s itinerary of pilgrimage to the Holy Land and letters exchanged between the Great Khân and Benedict XII; London, BL MS Additional 19513 contains the unique surviving copy of Jordan’s Mirabilia descripta and Pipino’s version of Marco Polo along with the first book of Jacques de Vitry’s Historia Hierosolimitana, Marino Sanuti’s book on the Holy Land, and an abbreviated version of Gerald of Wales’s Topographia Hiberniae, along with some non-travel literature; London, BL MS Arundel 13 contains only Marco Polo and Odoric; London, BL MS Royal 14 C xiii (owned by Simon Bozoun, Prior of Norwich, 1344–52) contains Rubruck, Odoric, and Marco Polo along with works by Jacques de Vitry and Gerald of Wales among others; Cambridge, UL MS Dd. i. 17 contains Marco Polo, Hetoum, and Mandeville among numerous other works.11 The regularity with which works on eastern contexts (both in the Holy Lands and farther east) are bound together (though we need to be cautious about the possibility of postmedieval compilation) suggests owners and readers perceived relationships among these kinds of texts, though many of the manuscripts in question also contain works that had nothing whatever to do with travel including lists of European archbishoprics, cures for worms in children, saints’ lives, Aesop’s fables, and treatises on urine. What, then, did they have in common? In addition to the spiritual edification supplied, especially by works on the Holy Land, they filled a European hunger for learning about faraway peoples. They supplied visions of oriental realms, often associated with the ancient notion of the “Indies” but also lands brought more recently into the spotlight such as Mongolia and China that helped satisfy a craving for knowledge, and were particularly prized when they fired the imagination too. A chief difference between their expectations and those of more recent readers, however, is that medieval readers did not regard a first-person account of the journey or a meditation on personal development as essential elements in making a work valuable and interesting. If travel writings are texts that take “travel as their essential condition of production,” then it is reasonable to put the works being considered in this book in this category. “Ethnographic writing” is another postmedieval term that has been applied to medieval travel writing with excellent results but perhaps does not have quite the range suggested by “travel writing.” Ethnography is, primarily, writing about human cultures; travel writing naturally encompasses this but also takes in matters of climate, geography, and other natural phenomena and does not imply the
