From the ancient period up to modern times, travel writing and the related discipline of geography have been key domains for the development of human understanding regarding the shape of the world, the diversity of nature, the boundaries of the human, and the character of the foreign. Focusing on maps and geographical writings, this seminar examines how notions of the marvellous and monstrous have shaped perceptions of the world and its inhabitants in the European, Indo-Persian, and East Asian traditions. How do ideas about marvels intersect with empiricism? What do they tell about rationality and modernity? And what is travel's role in disseminating, dispelling, or reconfiguring notions of the wondrous?

Core Reading (read two)

Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 21-39, 60-66. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Surekha Davies, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 148-182. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Huynhee Park, 'The Imagined Among the Real: The Country of Women in Traditional and Early Modern Chinese Geographical Accounts and Maps', in: Elizabeth Ketner and Alison Kavey (eds.), Imagining Early Modern Histories (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 101-124. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Empires between Christianity and Islam, 1500-1800 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2019), pp. 276-318. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Primary Sources

Psalter World Map (c. 1260)Link opens in a new window.

Hereford Mappa Mundi (c. 1300).Link opens in a new window

Martin Behaim Globe (1492). Link Link opens in a new windowand LinkLink opens in a new window.

Nuremberg Chronicle World map (1493)Link opens in a new window.

Bankoku sōzu (c. 1600)Link opens in a new window

Zhufan zhi 諸蕃志 (1225), A Chinese Gazetteer of Foreign Lands.Link opens in a new window

Ajā’ib al-makhlūqāt wa-gharā’ib al-mawjūdāt (Marvels of Things Created and Miraculous Aspects of Things Existing)Link opens in a new window, by Al-Qazwini (1203-1283).

Further Reading

Akbari, Suzanne Conklin, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–1450 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), Ch. 1: 'The Shape of the World'. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Alam, Muzaffar, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World: Studies on Culture and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), Ch. 2: 'The Mughals Look Beyond the Winds'. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Baumgärtner, Ingrid, Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, and Katrin Kogman-Appel (eds.), Maps and Travel in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period: Knowledge, Imagination, and Visual Culture (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2019). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Ben-Ami, Ido, 'Wonder in Early Modern Ottoman Society: A Case Study in the History of Emotions', History Compass 17.7 (2019), online. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Campbell, Mary Baine, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2014). Link.Link opens in a new window

Carey, Daniel, 'The Problem of Credibility in Early Modern Travel', Renaissance Studies 33.4 (2019), pp. 524-547. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Classen, Albrecht (ed.), Travel, Time, and Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time: Explorations of World Perceptions and Processes of Identity Formation (Boston and Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Davies, Surekha, ‘The Wondrous East in the Renaissance Geographical Imagination: Marco Polo, Fra Mauro and Giovanni Battista RamusioLink opens in a new window’, History and Anthropology 23.2 (2012), pp. 215-234. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Flores, Jorge, 'Distant Wonders: The Strange and the Marvelous between Mughal India and Habsburg Iberia in the Early Seventeenth Century', Comparative Studies in Society and History 49.3 (2007), pp. 553-581. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).

Greenblatt, Stephen, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), Ch. 2. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Harley, J.B., and David Woodward (eds.), The History of Cartography (3 Vols. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987-2007), LinkLink opens in a new window.

Hermes, Nizar F., The [European] Other in Medieval Arabic Literature and Culture: Ninth-Twelfth Century AD (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Higgins, Ian MacLeod, Writing East: The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Leitch, Stephanie, Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany: New Worlds in Print Culture (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), Ch. 2: 'Centering the Self: Mapping the Nuremberg Chronicle and the Limits of the World', pp. 17-35. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Lilley, Keith D. (ed.), Mapping Medieval Geographies: Geographical Encounters in the Latin West and Beyond, 300–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Mittman, Asa Simon, 'England is the World and the World is England', Postmedieval: a Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 9 (2018), pp. 15–29. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Nadhiri, Aman Y., Saracens and Franks in 12th-15th Century European and Near Eastern Literature: Perceptions of Self and the Other (London: Routledge, 2016), esp. Ch. 2 ('Al-iFranj: Medieval Muslim Perceptions of Western Europeans') and Ch. 3 (' The Medieval Travel Narrative and the Other in Ibn Fadlān, The Travels of Ibn Jubayr, and Mandeville’s Travels'). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Park, Hyunhee, Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds: Cross-Cultural Exchange in Pre-Modern Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Pinto, Karen, 'Searchin’ his eyes, lookin’ for traces: Piri Reis’ World Map of 1513 & its Islamic Iconographic Connections (A Reading Through Bagdat 334 and Proust)', The Journal of Ottoman Studies 39 (2012), pp. 63-94. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Ramey, Lynn Tarte, 'Monstrous Alterity in Early Modern Travel Accounts: Lessons from the Ambiguous Medieval Discourse on Humanness', L'Esprit Créateur 48.1 (2008), pp. 81-95. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Romano, John (ed.), Medieval Travel and Travelers: A Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), Ch. 1: 'Mapping out Journeys'. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Rubiés, Joan Pau, Medieval Ethnographies: European Perceptions of the World Beyond (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).

Wittkower, Rudolf, 'Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942), pp. 159-197. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Zhang, Cong Ellen, Transformative Journeys: Travel and Culture in Song China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010), Ch. 7: 'Sightseeing and Site Making: Visiting and Inscribing Places', pp. 154-179. LinkLink opens in a new window.

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