I've recently finished reading Jean Verdon's "Travel in the Middle Ages" (in translation) and I have a few thoughts on the book.
Mechanically, the book is quite accessible though the edition I read (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003 translated into English by George Holoch) is severely lacking in citations, the text is usually very clear and accessible. There is also a presupposed knowledge of the Middle Ages, or at least the expectation of a willingness to suspend chronology in order for the thematic arguments to flow together. Overall, I thought this to be a very accessible book for a general audience.
As a whole, Verdon sets out, seemingly, to construct the role and nature of physical travel across the entirety of the Middle Ages in the physical and literary realms. While the initial chapters hold to this, the later chapters wander into an analysis of the motivations and psychological constructions of not simply physical travel (trade, exploration, diplomacy, etc...) but rather the manner in which it can be said that the medieval soul experienced travel through sources such as Dante, Bede, and Muhammad.
Unfortunately, whereas Verdon sets out to demonstrate that travel in the Middle Ages is not relegated to the extreme ends of the social spectrum, the book ends up painting a picture of mass-mobility and cross culture contacts that feels misleading. Although the author does an excellent job of describing Christian and Muslim accounts of cross-culture contacts, there is a dearth of evidence from the visited centers (India, China, Scandinavia, etc...)
Additionally, while this work does an excellent job at creating the paradigm of travel in the Middle Ages, it lacks in consistent periodization which occasionally creates the illusion of a static culture throughout the Middle Ages in a way that simply wasn't possible. I think it would have been a significant improvement to examine in greater detail the progression of travel and journey through the centuries of the Middle Ages to create a clear sense of the changing perception of time in addition to proving the existence of 'motion' in the medieval world.
Possibly the single greatest lacuna in this edition, however, is the lack of citations in text to anything except primary sources and indirect references to modern scholars. Without citations, this book is useful as a starting point, but not much more - I suspect it would take a significant amount of time to trace what ideas came from where.
Leave a comment