ENL 3210- Fall 2025- Sprenkle

In popular imagination, medieval people lived static lives in homogenous communities. In reality, many from all walks of life were quite mobile. They journeyed for business, pleasure, curiosity, diplomacy, personal or spiritual enlightenment, and war (either as armies or as refugees), among other reasons. This course will introduce students to medieval narratives about travel and movement. What motivated travelers to start their journeys? Piety mixed with wanderlust, like the 14th-century Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta? Or maybe piety as an excuse for greater autonomy, like the 15th-century Englishwoman Margery Kempe? How did they describe the places and people they encountered along the way? Did they travel alone, or as part of a diplomatic envoy or a group of pilgrims? Did they write their accounts from notes or dictate to interlocutors from memory? And who were the audiences for their writings?

This class will consider a wide spectrum of travelers from various eras and geographical regions across Asia, Africa, and Europe as part of a larger project to engage scholarship on the Global Middle Ages and unsettle colonial perspectives of the European explorer. We will also examine connections between medieval travel narratives and more modern settler-colonial fantasies of exploration and conquest. Students can expect to write four short literary analysis papers over the semester and lead discussion with a group for one class.