Vojtěch Bažant — Jaroslav Svátek (eds.)
This book discusses travelogues that were copied, read or written in the Czech lands during the 14th and 15th centuries. It first analyses their narrative strategies, focalisation, reader definitions and constructed images of „others“, and then proceeds to examine in detail the surviving manuscripts, their specific characteristics and the use of their individual copies with respect to reading practices. The book is therefore not focused on the reality of medieval travel or on complex discourses about „others“, but specifically on the literary performances of these phenomena. The relevant texts are not treated as reports or mirrors of reality, nor as reflections, reworkings of experience, actual or represented, in a literary manner: such approaches always result, to a greater or lesser extent, in comparing reality and literary layers. Instead, this book explores the reality of the surviving travelogues, which constitute literary artefacts, both in the physical and narrative sense.