1st Edition
Medieval Ethnographies European Perceptions of the World Beyond
By Joan-Pau Rubies
Copyright 2009
466 Pages
by
Routledge
466 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
From the twelfth century, a growing sense of cultural confidence in the Latin West (at the same time that the central lands of Islam suffered from numerous waves of conquest and devastation) was accompanied by the increasing importance of the genre of empirical ethnographies. From a a global perspective what is most distinctive of Europe is the genre's long-term impact rather than its mere... Read more
Contents: Introduction; Part 1 Contexts and Genres: The outer world in the European Middle Ages, Seymour Phillips; The emergence of a naturalistic and ethnographic paradigm in late medieval travel writing, Joan-Pau Rubiés; Ethnographers in search of an audience, J.K. Hyde. Part 2 Myths: Continental drift: Prester John's progress through the Indies, Bernard Hamilton; The medieval West and the Indian Ocean: an oneiric horizon, Jacques Le Goff; Marco Polo and the pictorial tradition of the marvels of the East, Rudolf Wittkower; The Indian tradition in Western medieval intellectual history, Thomas Hahn. Part 3 Encounters: Gerald's ethnographic achievement, Robert Bartlett; William of Rubruck in the Mongol empire: perception and prejudices, Peter Jackson; Neolithic meets medieval: first encounters in the Canary Islands, David Abulafia; Veni, vidi, vici: some 15th-century eyewitness accounts of travel in the African Atlantic before 1492, Peter Russell; Travel fact and travel fiction in the voyages of Columbus, Valerie I.J. Flint. Part 4 Explaining Cultural Differences: The image of the barbarian in medieval Europe, W.R. Jones; Perceptions of hot climate in medieval cosmography and travel literature, Irina Metzler; Index.
Biography
Dr Joan-Pau Rubiés is Reader in International History at the LSE, UK
