HIS 259 - Topics: Travel Tales: Encounters with Others in the Premodern World (1)

Travel writing provided readers with stories of arduous journeys, monsters, strange customs, and unfamiliar people. Popular narratives such as Marco Polo’s book fed readers’ imaginations and helped to shape ideas about the world around them, which in turn could affect later encounters with unfamiliar cultures. In this course, we’ll read travel accounts from the medieval and early modern world (some real-life, some fictional), and examine how these stories described and influenced cultural contacts.
(Humanities)