Montserrat Piera's edited volume, Remapping Travel Narratives (1000-1700): To the East and Back Again is a welcome addition to the growing literature on premodern and early modern travel writing. A number of features distinguish this collection from others: its focus on writers from the East including travelers writing in Arabic, Persian and Hebrew; its general preference for comparative, rather than single-text interpretive pieces; and the broader perspective and contextualization of many of the articles in the collection owing to their comparative focus. These comparative and well contextualized pieces make the collection readily usable by students and faculty outside their immediate scholarly audiences.
A short introduction addresses the literary and critical gaps the volume seeks to redress, stating: "we aim at interrogating how various Islamic and eastern cultural threads were weaved, through travel and trading networks, into Western European / Christian visual culture and discourse," and namely the "reciprocal transfer of cultural values and artistic and scientific practices" (12)--in short, eastern cultural capital--which has yet to be traced for the medieval period relative to Renaissance studies (2, 3). The introduction is followed by three sections, the first devoted to "Transforming the Rihla Tradition" focusing on eastern, Islamicate travelers; a second section featuring Latin Christian travelers' accounts of major eastern premodern and early modern capitals; and a third section more loosely focused on the circulation of objects and ideas across east-west divides in a range of western sources.
Rebecca Gould begins the discussion of eastern travelers with a strong piece on the Persian Persian travel tradition's operation within broader examples of rihla, before turning to the place of Khaqani of Shirvan (d. 1199) within Persian travel and in relation to better known authors like Nasir Khusrow, Khayyam and Firdawsi. Gould shows how Khaqani shares in tropes of exile and imprisonment prevalent in the wider Persian tradition while putting his own accent upon it: through examinations of the poems "The Gift from Two Iraqs" (1157) and "Iwan-I Mada'in," Gould shows Khaqani's transformation of the trope of Sassanian and other imperial ruins prevalent in Persian travel writing into a critique of sovereign power and the assertion of the timelessness of poetry over sovereignty. In "Observing Ziyara in Medieval Muslim Travel Accounts," Janet Sorrentino places an unfamiliar lens on two familiar Muslim travelers, Ibn Jubayr and Ibn Battuta, showing them to be curious and tolerant of unorthodox, sectarian and non-Muslim religious expression in their journeys. In their receptivity to popular piety, they are, moreover, typical of the "literary travelling class" and of secular leadership in Muslim societies as opposed to religious ulama. Montserrat Piera writes on three "Vulnerable Medieval Iberian Travellers" including Benjamin of Tudela, Pero Tafur, and Ahmad al-Wazzan (Leo Africanus). Tracing the various types of vulnerability--physical, cultural and "transformative"--experienced by these travelers, Piera shows how this vulnerability and the travelers' relative degrees of immersion into the cultures they visit produced variable insights. While the account of Benjamin of Tudela, himself a marginalized and non-hegemonic western subject, "renders an incriminatory and obvious conclusion: Jews suffer under Christian rule, while they thrive under Muslim rule" (72), an ethnographically curious Pero Tafur "goes native" in Constantinople and Asia Minor just prior to their Ottoman conquest. Dressing in Muslim garb in Turkish Adrianople, even buying female slaves at a slave market in Kaffa, Tafur is under the thrall of the "power and magnificence of the [Turkish] enemy" (76), an unsettling view of the West in decline that renders his vulnerable (79). Most vulnerable of all is Ahmad al-Wazzan or Leo Africanus, as he has come to be known in the west, who's life as a diplomat, scholar and traveler was disrupted in 1518 when he captured by a Spanish pirate in North Africa. Sent to Rome as a gift to Pope Leo X, where he was imprisoned and later baptized, Al-Wazzan authored a book of African geography in an unsteady Italian tongue in which he attempted to balance his loyalty to his African home with his need to please his patrons. Piera ascribes the "respectful openness" of all three travelers to their Iberian origins and unique heritage of convivencia, but vulnerability is a consistent trope of the premodern travel canon, and the destabilizing, unsettling effects of outside perspectives upon the premodern traveler's worldview has been recently plotted for a number of travelers well beyond the Iberian Peninsula (George-Tvrtkovic 2012, Khanmohamadi 2013 and 2014).
In the book's second section ("Imagining the East: Egypt, Persia, and Istabul in my Mind"), Matthew V. Desing first traces changes in the image of Egypt in Iberian contexts from the 13th century to the late 14th in his essay on "Tierras de Egipto." Examining three narrative representations of Egypt and the Levant compiled together in a single late 14th century manuscript, K-III-4 of the Royal Library of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, he argues for a heightened interest in North Africa as well as in Jerusalem and crusading abroad apparent in these poems and in the late 14th century upon the securing of Christian ascendancy at home after the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa. The result is a greater elaboration and a more concretized, realistic image of Egypt and the Levant in the manuscript poems compared with earlier literary representations. Nedda Mehdizadeh examines the depiction of Rostam, the hero of the national Persian epic The Shahnamehor Book of Kings, in Thomas Herbert's account of his journey to Safavid Persia in 1626,A Relation of Some Yeares Travaile. Mehdizadeh argues that in telling only of Rostam's death even as his larger story was being recounted orally in performances in the Safavid capital Isfahan he visited, Herbert moved to "petrify" the (for Herbert) unsettling vitality of the contemporary Safavid dynasty. Herbert likewise favors, she shows, images of past, ancient Persian glory to present imperial description. Elio Brancaforte examines an array of texts and visual illustrations describing Shi'ite rituals observed in Safavid Iran by three early modern European travelers, Pietro Della Valle, Adam Olearius, and Jean de Thévenot. Brancaforte provides lively and full contexts to these travel accounts, noting that "to varying degrees, early modern European travelers to Safavid Iran were sensitive to the concept of religious difference, and several sought to give detailed information about Shi'ism in their accounts" (153). Their illustrators, who'd usually not travelled to the countries themselves, often took greater liberties, indulging in ready Orientalist tropes to garner readerly attention, such as "a dervish mutilating himself, or a turbaned Ottoman soldier standing with upraised sword in front of a mosque, ready to threaten Christian Europe" (153). While Brancaforte describes the illustrations he treats in great and satisfying detail, one wishes for a conclusion regarding these images beyond their not being "accurate portrayals" (140, 154). Sezim Sezer Darnault and Aygul Agir's "Visions of a Pilgrimage of Curiosity" focuses on the central role played by Pietro Della Valle as a cultural intermediary between Italy and the Ottomans in the seventeenth century, tracing his efforts to find commonalities between Italian and Ottoman "topography, cities, monuments, spaces, and processions" (179). The writers identify further commonalities, noting the shared Trojan myths of both societies (Sultan Mehmed II payed homage to Troy in the mode of Caesar before him) and the role of antique revival in the Ottoman empire as well as in Renaissance Europe (172). The borrowing was multidirectional and mutual: while the Ottomans employed Hagia Sophia as a model for their mosques, Della Valle brought back images from paintings of imperial mosques for use by Italian architects. In all, Della Valle importantly shaped European perceptions of the Ottomans into the 18th century, "before Orientalism" (184).
A final section ("To the East and Back: Exchanging Objects, Ideas, and Texts") less cohesively traces a variety of east-west connections established through texts and objects. Adriano Duque's piece on "Gift-giving in the Carpini Expedition" examines the precarious dynamics of gift giving for friars traveling as preachers or emissaries to the Mongol empire. Because these Christian friars generally understood that gifts would be interpreted as forms of tribute in the Mongol realm, they sought to distinguish carefully between gifts given as "toll" to lesser powers and to intermediaries, and gifts given as tribute to sovereigns. While they may have been trying "to obliterate the obligations of gift-giving" in their refusals before sovereigns, they were ultimately "unable to produce a different perspective on gift-giving" (198-199). Gregory Kaplan traces the travel of Karaite ideas from late medieval Spain into Spinoza's Amsterdam by way of conversocommunities. Kaplan traces the effort to label and suppress Karaite thought as "heresy" by the likes of Ibn Daud in 12th century Spain ultimately contributed to anti-Jewish polemic in the hands of Abner de Burgos in the 13th century and Alfonso de Espina's "invective against Jewish sectarianism" in the 15th century, "foreshadow[ing] the process by which anti-converso persecution became institutionalized" (212). Kaplan then shows the ongoing influence of Ibn Daud's ideas upon Spinoza's Sephardic exile community in Amsterdam and in Spinoza's own endeavors to undermine both Rabbinic and Karaite ideas there. Pilar Ryan traces changes in the historiography of the translation of a relic, Francis Xavier's arm, from Goa to Rome from the mid-16th to 17th centuries, showing how the later narratives tend to be shaped into "a tale of strength and a show of force" (223) suited to the more competitive, unruly and unpredictable environment of early modern seas. Ambereen Dadabhoy examines the interplay of race and religion in the Jacobean play TheKnights of Malta (1618). Through close reading of the differential gendered treatment of the play's main Muslim female characters, the fair-skinned Lucinda and the dark Abdella, she concludes that in the play "the simultaneous assimilation and expulsion of Muslims emplots a discursive trajectory that will construct Muslims who challenge and defy the cultural hegemonies asserted by the English and Europeans as racialized" (256). In doing so, the play "writes its imperial and cultural anxieties, its fears of the fluidity of the Mediterranean and its economy of traffic, travel, exchange, and conflict on the body of a black, Muslim woman" (256). Finally, in an examination of the nature of credibility in Renaissance English travel reports, Julia Schleck compares the relative credibility of mercantile accounts of the East India Company and noblemen's ambassadorial reports regarding the state of Safavid Persia and Shah Abbas I's openness to a direct silk trade with King James of England. At this early stage in the East India Company, she concludes, the company did not necessarily enjoy the same status and credibility afforded the Shah's chosen ambassador, Sir Robert Shelley, and that of other noblemen.
Offering an array of comparative and contextual studies, this collection contains many ambitious pieces that will lend themselves to teaching introductory as well as more specialized courses in pre- or early modern travel, but it is, as many collections are, uneven in quality and some pieces would have benefitted from more editorial intervention and polish. Moreover, at least half of the pieces treat the early modern period, falling short of the collection's stated aims of spotlighting cultural interchange and eastern symbolic capital in the medieval era. Nevertheless, this is an informative and freshly conceived collection that opens up new perspectives on east-west exchange and entanglement in multiple medieval and early modern contexts, and in so doing admirably side-steps the Eurocentric focus of many comparative studies of travel like it.