Anthony Bale and Sebastian Sobecki's Medieval English Travel is a wonderful anthology, in the full meaning of that word. Thanks to their capacious understanding of the term travel, Bale and Sobecki have brought together a very rich array of texts and genres from a broad period of travel conducted between 1102 and 1518, richer than any I have seen yet, including Middle English and in one or two cases early Renaissance English translations of texts relevant to English travel and excerpts from two by women. (Only Saewulf's early twelfth-century Latin manuscript is included in modern translation.) The more familiar texts included (Chaucer's Squires Tale, the Middle English Floris & Blancheflour, the “channel crossings” from the Alliterative Morte Arthure) can be reread with profit and sometimes wonder in this expanded context. And the less familiar are another kind of treat. Despite having read and studied medieval travel (and romance) most of my life, I have not had the opportunity to teach a course directly focused on the corpus in English because so much of it was not easily available to students, and too many longer or famous texts were available only in inexpensive modern English translations that inevitably rob them of their charm and the thrill for students of touching the past. Some of the shorter obscure texts provide that thrill exquisitely—the “Documents of the English Pilgrims at Rome,” the “Two Travellers’ Itineraries,” the 1492 “Capitulation of Granada,” William Wey's will, which leaves to a Wiltshire chapel among other things “in a borde byhynde the queer [choir] the lengthe of oure Lorde ys sepulkyr, with the hythe of the dor, the bred of the dore, the lengthe of oure Lordes fote” (400)—all are edited here, as are others, for the first time. If I had not retired recently from teaching, I would be inspired to create a course around this anthology immediately. $115 is pricey but reasonable, compared to the cost for students assigned eight paperbacks, common in literature courses.
Bale and Sobecki delegated some of the work to a distinguished list of contributing editors: Joanna Bellis, Julia Boffey, A. S. G. Edwards, Matthew Boyd Goldie, Alfred Hiatt, and Jonathan Hsy. Of these, Bellis, Goldie, Hiatt, and Hsy also contributed excellent essays to the volume's part one, introducing students and other readers to important contexts (such as maps, trade and exchange, languages and codes) of the works included. For this (literary) reader Bale's, Hsy's and—too brief—Sobecki's essays stand out. There is no essay focused on literary contexts, but this may be because the editors feel unable to generalize about a corpus so wildly various in genre. One might nonetheless have asked for an essay on medieval differentiations of and between verse and prose: there are many utilitarian or historical texts in the volume delivered not just in verse but in stanzas, which is bound to confuse and intrigue students.
This wonderful book has some flaws that should be noted, if only to make my review more credible. Perhaps because there are several individual editors, there is a lack of consistency in the headnotes: Edwards, for instance, provides no date ranges for the text or the two extant manuscripts of what he calls The Division of the World, in an otherwise detailed headnote; no date is given for the Middle English translation, Mappula Angliae, of Ranulf Higden's mid-fifteenth-century Polychronicon, or the manuscript from which the first eleven chapters are edited here. And, of course, I have arguments with some of the excerpting. I am grateful that so many texts are included in their entirety, or at least without ellipses, but The Description of the World (a condensed version of Polychronicon Book I) is missing sections I.1 and I.4, and there are many ellipses and missing sections in the extraordinary excerpt from book 7 of Saint Bridget of Sweden's Revelations, which could have been provided in full. Literature students will feel hamstrung by these, and though historians may not, they should. Every sentence is context for, at the very least, another sentence; themes, motifs, and scope can be lost or missed. Finally, the glossing, or not, of more obscure Middle English words is puzzling: there are unglossed words, sometimes more than one within a phrase, that after forty-five years of studying and teaching and publishing on Middle English texts I could not recognize or make out from context, while common words and spelling variants were glossed.
Given that so few texts here are female-authored—excerpts from Margery Kempe and Bridget of Sweden, plus perhaps, though the headnote is mute, “The Walsingham Ballad,” in which notably only female points of view are inhabited—the 528-page book could have made more space for these remarkable texts. In particular, Hsy's “Codes and Languages” struck me by the absence of an excerpt related to Margery Kempe's difficulties and successes talking and dictating to German speakers, always a fascinating, sometimes a crucial issue in reading accounts of long-distance travel.
I do not mean to suggest that the volume is designed only for students, though many educators will respond, as I have, with a desire to teach a course in Middle English literature through the timely and contested lens of travel and its relation to alterity: our students would not lack for literary treasure, geographical breadth, or historiographical vividness. But it has also been a serious pleasure to spend time with this anthology during the unprecedented experience of our global lockdown during the winter and spring of 2020, when my own “armchair” isolation and my sense of its global context, of my sharers across the world, have been intense. There are still entries I have not read—the verse Stacions of Rome, the stanzaic Libylle of Englyshe Polycye, the ballad-esque “Pilgrims’ Sea Voyage” (to fifteenth-century Santiago de Compostela)—and I look forward to them mightily.
