Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
‘What can we know of the world? What quantity of space can our eyes hope to take in between our birth and our death? How many square centimetres of Planet Earth will the soles of our feet have touched?’
As Georges Perec observes, our personal experience of the world is lamentably finite. As much – or as little – as one seeks to travel, one will never experience the entire world. The only way we can know the world outside of our personal experience is necessarily at a remove. Our geographical knowledge of the overwhelming majority of the world is thus mediated through text, image, narrative. No less true for the modern age, this was particularly the case during the medieval period, where the geographical radii of peoples' lives, as well as their exposure to geographical media, were commonly more restricted than today. However, just as we today experience the world through National Geographic, travel shows and the aspirational reading of Lonely Planet guidebooks, the people of the medieval period also revelled in travel narratives. In the Auchinleck manuscript narrative of Guy of Warwick, the eponymous protagonist travels throughout Europe, from Warwick to Normandy, through Spain, Germany, Lombardy and thence onwards to more exotic locales such as Constantinople, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Alexandria. His travels chart his development as first a chivalric and later a Christian hero, transforming him from an ideal lover-knight into the embodiment of the pious martial pilgrim.
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