Instead of understanding these narrated journeys as authentic accounts, the panel focuses on the various narrative strategies used to create, frame, and communicate experiences of or related to traveling. This, on the one hand, includes the transmission of pragmatic knowledge like itinerary records, the registration of distances traveled, or the description of places where indulgences can be received. On the other hand, the papers in this panel will also look at texts that allow direct participation in the religious experience of pilgrimage or ascribe the experience of having traveled to specific characters. The ways in which travel is narrated vary across genres and time, and offer insight into the different conceptualizations and functions of traveling. Itineraries, chronicles, (auto-)biographical accounts, travel epics and early romances, songs and poems about travel, pilgrimage guides, and other types of travel texts bear witness to the manifold ways of approaching experiences of travel in pre-modern literature.

Especially now, in times in which traveling is and has been restricted and society became more aware of the difficulties but also the joys of undertaking journeys, this panel can provide valuable insight into how perspectives on and assessments of traveling depend on historical context. Further, the papers will highlight different ways in which literature invites its readers to participate in travel experiences. Particularly at points in time and in cultural contexts that prevent people or specific groups from physical travel, mediating travel experiences by means of literature becomes vital.

The panel includes four 15-minute long papers on different pre-modern travel narratives that communicate and evoke different types of experience by employing diverse literary strategies:

1. Creating Impressions of Experience: Hans Stadens’ Warhaftige Historia (1557)

(Susanne Knaeble, Dresden/Bayreuth)

Hans Staden’s travel narrative was first published in 1557 in Marburg, and became a contemporary best-seller. It presents a marvelous encounter in the ‚New World‘ through its detailed description of indigenous customs and provocative woodcuts. This contribution highlights how the text mediates ‘experience’ in a way that the early modern reader should be encouraged to receive Staden’s travel narrative as a part of his transformation to become a protestant pastor and powerful male subject in the ‚New World‘.

2. Deceptive Appearances: Travel and Subterfuge in König Rother

(Björn Klaus Buschbeck, Zürich)

In the high medieval epic König Rother, travel and subterfuge constitute two key plot elements. This paper will shed light on how this text intertwines these motifs by either attributing specific types of experience to traveling characters or allowing them to falsely claim to have made astonishing and exclusive experiences connected to travel. The elaborate game of ruses that the protagonist Rother and his antagonist Constantine play thus relies to large parts on either real or feigned experience tied to coming from far away. The epic presents both travel as a way of exchanging experiences and traveling as an opportunity to use this exchange of experiences for the purpose of deceit.

3. Experiencing Travel: Multimodal Strategies in ‚Fortunatus‘ (1509)

(Florian Remele, Lausanne)

The early modern prose romance Fortunatus printed in Augsburg by Johannes Otmar (1509) presents different forms and evaluations of traveling and, thus, mediates the contemporary discourse on travel experiences to the recipients through literary means. The multimodal mediations of travel experience in Fortunatus are multidirectional processes in which text and image do not offer an unambiguous evaluation of journeys. Insight is, rather, established through the different reading paths offered by the illustrated print.

4. Traveling through Text and Image in Arnold of Harff’s Pilgrimage Account

(Mareike E. Reisch, Freiburg)

Between 1496 and 1498, Arnold of Harff traveled Europe and the Levante. Using illuminations and narrative text, the account narrates Arnold’s travel experiences by means of two different media. The account renders, so the argument of the paper, various impressions of Arnold’s experiences, depending on the reader’s engagement with text and image.