Traveling Through Text: Message and Method in Late Medieval Pilgrimage Accounts (Studies in Medieval History and Culture)

Elka Weber explores religious travel writing by Muslims, Christians and Jews in the later Middle Ages - a comparison that has not been done before. This approach allows us to see that writers in all three religious communities used travel writing in the same way; to shape the perceptions of their readers by asserting the author's authority. The central paradox of religious travel writing is that the travel writer reads about a place, usually in a sacred text, decides to supplement the reading with empirical experience of visiting and describing the place, and then creates his own descriptive text. Elka Weber argues that in writing this new book, and in letting his readers know his authorial, the travel writer himself is daring the reader to challenge the new text. Therefore, is a book ever enough? For societies that value their scared texts, this question is a challenge, but it is a challenge posed by writers who live firmly in the religious tradition. "Traveling through Text" also discusses the relationship of the authors to their readers, explores the tensions between text and empirical experience as found in the writings of religious writers who value holy texts.