[ISHMap-List] CFP- Kalamazoo 2019 "Re-Mapping/Re-Reading Pre-Modern Travel Narratives and Maps"

[Giovanna Montenegro]

Hi!

 Please do share the CFP widely.

Sincerely,

Giovanna Montenegro
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Papers are sought for "Re-Mapping/Re-Reading Pre-Modern Travel Narratives
and Maps," a session sponsored by Mediaevalia: An Interdisciplinary Journal
of Medieval Studies Worldwide for the 54th International Congress on
Medieval Studies (May 9-12, 2019) @Western Michigan University
(Kalamazoo,MI).


Great travel narratives of the Middle Ages such as Marco Polo’s Il Milione,
Jean Mandeville’s Travels, and the Travels of Ibn Battutah reveal that
agents from both Christian Europe and Islamic North Africa experienced the
world from a profoundly global perspective. Recently scholars such as
Sharon Kinoshita have read Marco Polo within the context of a multilingual
Mongol and Central Asian cosmopolitanism, Shirin Khanmohammadi has
investigated the way through which Mandeville’s narrative expands
ethnographic categories, and Christine Chism has written about how Battutah
situates his travels between the worlds of Islam and Christendom. Although
the purpose of their travels includes religious pilgrimage and commerce,
Marco Polo’s, Mandeville’s, and Battutah’s narratives are rich in
ethnographic and geographic description, despite their dubious editorial
origins that read as literary pastiche. What is evident is that the
cosmopolitan experience of Dar-al-Islam in Battutah, combined with
Mandeville’s descriptions of the Holy Land and more fantastical
descriptions of the East, along with Marco Polo’s contested and
controversial accounts of trade in contact zones, reveal a new way of
thinking about geography beyond the confines of the T-O Map, the
Mappaemondi, or the Portolan Chart, around which discussions of the
cartographic genre in the Middle Ages were centered. Such was the influence
of Marco Polo and Mandeville that Martin Behaim included both travel
accounts on his globe when he tried to convince King John II of Portugal to
partake in voyages of exploration to western Africa and the Indies in the
late 15th century.


This panel seeks papers that explore ways through which pre-modern travel
narratives can be read geographically; also it seeks ways to read maps that
were influenced by literature, i.e. literary cartographies. In what ways
are late Medieval and early Renaissance maps shaped by literature?
Inversely, how are travel narratives and chronicles shaped by the
cartographic tradition that included the itinerarium, as well as Ptolemy in
Arabic and Greek? How can a reevaluation of other premodern cartographies
(i.e. Mesoamerican, South Asian, African) inform the way we read canonical
Western travel narratives and change the way we consider place and space?


Please send 1) your one-page abstracts  2) an academic CV and 3) a
completed participant information form (available at http://wmich.edu/sites/
default/files/attachments/u434/2018/medieval-2019-pif.pdf ) to Giovanna
Montenegro gmontene at binghamton.edu by September 15.


Please familiarize yourself with the rules of the congress available here
http://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/policies-guidelines

-- 

Giovanna Montenegro, PhD

Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature
and Romance Languages
gmontene at binghamton.edu
Office: LT 1508

Phone: (607) 777-6566

Webpage: http://giovannamontenegro.com/
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