IMC 2024: Sessions

Revolving around episodes of crises in (potentially) virtual and allegorical travels in medieval literature, this session consists of three papers that consider travel in the medieval imaginary to reveal how medieval writers addressed the very real crises of their world in fictionalized narratives. Raschi’s paper delves deeply into Dante’s Comedia to search for insights about fourteenth-century climatic developments. Comparing Dante’s writing against evidence from climate science, it seeks to better understand these climatological changes and their relationship with the agricultural lives of medieval Europeans. Gevorgyan’s paper likewise considers cross-Mediterranean travel by analyzing fictional works by Giovanni Bocaccio and the Anonymous Genoese poet. He attempts to peer through these imagined depictions of Mediterranean cultures to understand what the authors knew of the societies which they depicted. The final paper in our list, by Raissa de Gruttola, addresses Marco Polo’s semi-fictional account of his travels to the Mongol court, as put into words by Arthurian romance writer Rustichello de Pisa, together with accounts provided by Franciscan friars of their own travels to Cathay. She frames these works alongside each other in order to determine how the authors’ own religious zeal and preconceptions shaped their thoughts about the East when the late-medieval world system was undergoing moments of crisis and reshuffling.