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IMC 2017: Sessions

Session 1523: Writing the Other in the Middle Ages, I: Travellers and Their Cultural Preconceptions

Thursday 6 July 2017, 09.00-10.30

Organiser:Irene Malfatto, Società Internazionale per lo Studio del Medioevo Latino, Firenze
Moderator/Chair:Marianne O'Doherty, Institute for Medieval Studies, University of Leeds
Paper 1523-aChallenging the Classics: Crusader Travel Accounts and Their Portrayal of the 'Easterner'
(Language: English)
Ivo Wolsing, Independent Scholar, Amsterdam
Index terms: Crusades, Language and Literature - Latin, Learning (The Classical Inheritance), Mentalities
Paper 1523-bHagrites, Hagarenes, Chaldeans, and Saracens: Missing Muslims on the Spanish March, 800-1000
(Language: English)
Jonathan Jarrett, Institute for Medieval Studies, University of Leeds
Index terms: Daily Life, Geography and Settlement Studies, Islamic and Arabic Studies, Mentalities
Paper 1523-c'Multum quesivi de monstris': Collisions between Reality and Expectations in Medieval Travel Narratives
(Language: English)
Irene Malfatto, Società Internazionale per lo Studio del Medioevo Latino, Firenze
Index terms: Language and Literature - Latin, Learning (The Classical Inheritance), Literacy and Orality, Mentalities
Abstract

Encounters with otherness in the Middle Ages could take place as a result of long and short journeys, from northern Europe to the Middle or Far East for trade or crusade or from one side of a mountain frontier to the other, taking the traveller from a Christian to a Muslim space. In every case travellers confronted existing ideas of the Other with direct experience to create new syntheses of knowledge or rejections of it. These three papers will examine the ways in which ideas about Others shaped accounts of meetings with them in a range of different narrative sources.