a blog about travel literature
Why is it so much fun to read Medieval travel stories that we know are at least partly untrue?
Jehan de Mandeville claims to have traveled around much of the known (and unknown) world of his time. Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, India, China – you name the place, and he almost surely…
Did conservative ethics turn this great adventure story into such a slow read?
Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Battuta is only a very young man when he embarks on his hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. But he doesn’t stop there. Instead he goes on and on and on, and several travels during the next three decades will take him almost everywhere in…
If this is a great classic in Portuguese literature, why is it such a slow read?
This book was a big success in Europe during the 17th and 18th century. It was published a few decades after Fernão Mendes Pinto’s death and describes the quixotic ways…