Anthony Bell’s Guide to the Middle Ages (Excerpt)

In the “Reading” column, Denevnik published an excerpt from “A Guide to the Middle Ages” written by Anthony Bell, provided by the “East-West” publishing house

It’s a delightfully fascinating journey into the medieval world through the eyes of those who traveled to the known frontiers of the time.

In Anthony Bell’s book, history comes alive in a kaleidoscope of real testimony, legend, and fantasy – from the bustling markets of Tabriz to the Antipodes to the imagined end of the world at the time. The Medieval Guide invites readers on a journey through a medieval world dotted with unseen wonders and long-lost landmarks.

This extraordinary guide takes you from Western Europe to the Far East in the company of scientists, spies and saints. It covers everything a curious reader could ask: from the most banal details of a traveler’s life to incredible stories about flying coffins and romantic legends about beautiful princesses.

The Medieval Guide uses previously unknown accounts from travelers in places like Turkey, Iceland, Armenia, North Africa, and Russia. This medieval geographical and historical atlas blends real and imagined places to give readers a firsthand look at the worldview of medieval people.

Anthony Bell is Professor of Medieval Studies. He has taught undergraduate English and MA programs in Medieval Literature and Culture, and currently supervises PhD students on medieval topics.

Bell has published extensively on medieval literature, culture, and religion. Much of his research is on Christian-Jewish relations in medieval England and medieval pilgrimage culture. He has edited and translated several medieval texts, as well as new translations and editions of John Mandeville’s Book of Wonders, Marjorie Kemp’s book, and the guidebook A Journey Through Medieval England.

His current work explores travel, books, and pilgrimage between late medieval England and the Holy Land. His new study of Marjory Kemp is out in October 2021. The Medieval Guide is out in the UK in November 2023 and in the US in early 2024. In addition to Bulgarian, the book has been translated into Dutch, German, Italian, Portuguese; more translations are coming soon.

From Anthony Bell’s Guide to the Middle Ages

Traveling through the Middle Ages

As I researched the history and culture of medieval travel, I wandered for years in the company of past travelers who lived in a seemingly different world. Through the guidebooks and accounts of medieval people, I was able to trace the practicalities, pleasures, and dangers of traveling during that era. From Oxford to Istanbul, I sat in quiet libraries in monasteries and palaces, reading medieval manuscripts about travelers’ experiences.

I set out to follow the medieval pilgrims’ route, through the streets and churches of Rome and Jerusalem. I’ve encountered downpours in Aachen and Ulm and lost my way in the Beijing night. I’ve experienced food poisoning and scorching heat, panicked from tick bites, and contracted the coronavirus in places I barely knew about. When I dropped my last ship off an atoll in the Maldives, I felt abandoned and mistrusted. I’ve paid fees, sometimes overcharges, arrived in ports during strikes, changed plans at the last minute, and had to buy all sorts of permits, documents, and travel documents countless times.

In this book, my sources are medieval guidebooks and travelogues. The reader encounters medieval travelers of all abilities who appear on the page and disappear; like the people we meet on our journeys, they may leave an indelible impression on us, but they don’t stay with us for long. In this text, I have recreated the world that medieval people imagined, with many places that authors wrote about but sometimes didn’t see in person. The travelers we meet may not always be to our liking, but so often are the people we meet along the way.

The idea of ​​traveling the world was central to the European Christian imagination. We see it in the maps of the world (mappae mundi) drawn up in monasteries; in pilgrimages to the tombs of saints; in the soul’s longing for both the earthly and heavenly Jerusalem; in the rotation of the first globes. Travel meant the acceptance of new knowledge, but also the independence of one’s own perspective. When we are at home, we often yearn for travel and faraway places, but it is only at home that the pleasures and rewards of travel become most apparent to us. There is always the temptation to travel, but the reality rarely matches the exotic stories we tell ourselves.

In medieval travel literature, genres intersect: autobiography, nature description, encyclopedia, confession, history, diary, ethnography, etc. These texts often contain a certain amount of self-love and misconception, including stories of fantastical creatures (dog-sized ants, women with jewels for eyes, griffins—half lion, half eagle, powerful enough to carry off a horse) and places the author had heard of but never seen or visited (the Fountain of Youth, the Amazon, even Paradise on Earth itself).

To travel through the Middle Ages is to walk the line between fact and fiction. Even leaving that aside, travel writing is inevitably deeply subjective—partly because travel often means encounters with the unseen and unheard, and partly because authors inject into their writing all the errors and negative judgments that result from their cultural heritage or personal biases.

Travel as a cultural phenomenon is not simply a displacement in space. “Traveler” can refer to anyone on the move: a traveler, a wanderer, a convert, or a pilgrim. Forced migration; expulsion from a city or country; travelling at the will of a master; engaging in a distant war with a conscripted army: such things are movements, not journeys.

A journey usually involves a sense of the atmosphere of a place and implies a purpose or chosen route, an expected encounter with something different, an action we take of our own volition or deliberation. Part of such a journey is the plan or hope of returning home, the choice to (temporarily) withdraw from one’s own world, the desire to gain some knowledge from the journey.

The Codex Calixtinus (c. 1138-1145) is one of the earliest guidebooks that meets this definition – a collection of advice for pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela: which relics pilgrims should visit, where to find fresh water, how to avoid wasps and horseflies, how to properly pray at the saint’s tomb. Written travel guides were common in Europe as early as 1200, and as pilgrimages became more popular, from around 1350 onwards the genre (sometimes called Ars apodemica, advice literature for travelers) became a form of expression of the author’s curiosity.

Medieval travel writing is one of the places where the narrative self takes on clear outlines. Curiosity about the world crystallizes into concrete stories about places seen and personal experiences. In the Middle Ages, travel writing was not yet an established genre. Instead, they emerged as a sideline activity that took uncertain steps alongside travel practices, but was mainly addressed to those who did not travel or could not travel. These texts were written for those who had a taste for the exotic and atypical and were interested in remote and hard-to-reach corners of the world.

Travel is often an engine of intense introspection—as travel writer Alain de Botton puts it, travel is “the midwife of thought.” On the one hand, we nourish our thoughts through the conversations we have with ourselves on the train or on the ship—the moments of self-absorption during the journey, between departure and arrival. On the other hand, travel stimulates thinking through encounters we embrace or endure with pain, encounters that also involve challenges because they are new, strange, and unfamiliar.

In the following chapters, we will travel through the medieval world, where we will see the values, pleasures, fears, and desires that were rooted in travel. We will see what intellectual and spiritual development travel provided, and how people responded to the familiar impulse to record and document their travels for posterity.