The World of Travellers
Exploration and Imagination: Germania Latina VII
edited by K. Dekker, K.E. Olsen and T. Hofstra
Travel has always been a favourite human concern. Throughout the centuries, fascination with the unfamiliar or even unknown has turned many people into geographers, explorers, and writers of travel fiction. In the early Middle Ages, a great variety of travel accounts were accordingly appropriated, translated, recontextualised, and ultimately found their way into the literary production of Germanic Europe. The interest in distant countries and peoples was complemented by spiritual concerns, such as one finds in the accounts of early pilgrims to the Holy Land. The key words in the title of this book, ‘exploration and imagination’, imply that travel meant more than visiting foreign places and peoples. As with modern fantasy and science fiction literature, travel could also stimulate the imagination, especially in cases when perilous physical journeys were enhanced by imagined travel. Such accounts were rich in descriptions of the physical world, but they lent themselves equally to the relation of spiritual journeys. As a result, modern out-of-body experience finds its medieval counterpart in the journeyings and adventures of the human soul within a metaphysical and eschatological perspective. Finally, imagery travel may also be purely intellectual. The articles in this volume address the categories of travel outlined above in the light of the interface between the Latin and Germanic traditions.
- Edited by K Dekker
- Edited by T Hofstra
- Edited by KE Olsen
Other Titles in this Series
Rhetoric, Royalty, and Reality
Essays on the Literary Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Scotland
Volume 7
Literature and Religion in Late Medieval and Early Modern Scotland
Essays in Honour of Alasdair A. MacDonald
Volume 18
Northern Voices
Essays on Old Germanic and Related Topics, Offered to Professor Tette Hofstra. Germania Latina VI
Volume 11
Friars, Scribes, and Corpses
A Marian Confraternal Reading of The Mirror of Human Salvation (Speculum humanae salvationis)
Volume 12
Alexander Magnus Arabicus
A Survey of the Alexander Tradition through Seven Centuries: from Pseudo-Callisthenes to Suri
Volume 13
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