| Abstract | Paper -a:
This paper considers links between Raphael and travel in the Digby Mary Magdalene Play, where he is named, significantly, as the angel who sends Mary to Marseilles. In the Book of Tobit Raphael is the patron of travel for secular and commercial interests, demonstrating the compatibility of the pursuit of temporal affairs with Christian living. Mary Magdalene takes on many of Raphael's attributes in her travels of conversion. As East Anglia, the assumed home of this play, was a centre of lay piety and commercial travel, the explicit connection between Mary and Raphael highlights and resolves real audience concerns.
Paper -b:
This paper examines the depiction of travel in four Burgundian prose romances of the mid-15th century. Focusing primarily on the manuscripts and their illustrations, I show how the prose texts invest more heavily in travel than did their verse sources, revealing an aspirational ideology of conspicuous consumption, and responding to the culture of excess characteristic of the so-called Burgundian 'theatre state'. In addition, I consider how the manuscripts themselves – high-status productions, generally illustrated by prestigious artists – can be seen as objets d'art in their own right. The artefact, I suggest, precedes the text it contains: the prose text provides a narrative articulation of the lifestyle aspirations encoded in the book as object.
Paper -c:
The (re)discovery of Greek classical antiquity is bound up inseparable with the person of the Italian merchant, humanist, and antiquarian Ciriaco d' Ancona (1391-1452?). In this paper new evidence will be provided, which will open an unexpected new chapter and deliver important hints for the otherwise only scarcely known wandering activities of the Italian traveller during his visit of the island Crete. Ciriaco's travel diaries from his Cretan expedition in the summer of the year 1445 have got almost completely lost. However, from few preserved diary fragments and letters referring to this travel, which hand down to us sporadic antique inscriptions copied by Ciriaco from sites in all four big prefectures of Crete, it becomes apparent that the Italian traveller must have crossed the island in all directions during his Cretan journey. Focusing on these epigraphical documents, as well as on Ciriaco's comments on the local people, on the Cretan culture, Flora and Fauna and his proven knowledge of the treatise of Cristoforo Buondelmonti Descriptio Insulae Cretae, I will strive to reconstruct Ciriaco's itinerary during his stay at the island of Crete.
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