Publication details
Struggling with Fear? Emotions in Medieval Travel Accounts about the Mongols
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | To Jerusalem and Beyond : Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Latin Travel Literature, c.1200-1500 |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | https://heiup.uni-heidelberg.de/catalog/book/998/c15843 |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.17885/heiup.998.c15843 |
| Keywords | medieval Latin travel accounts; Franciscans; Mongols; emotional communities |
| Description | The mendicant travel accounts to Asia, namely those of John of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck, express their fear of the Mongols. The paper demonstrates how understanding such emotional expressions within their travel accounts can help us broaden our understanding of these particular texts. Following Barbara Rosenwein’s theory of emotional communities, the paper suggests distinguishing between two different emotional communities and two systems of feelings that meet, combine, and even clash within one travel account – the audience’s emotional community and the traveller’s emotional community. Besides the problem of their mutual interaction within one text, the paper also examines expressing emotions in a subordinate position by using James Scott’s theory of ‘hidden transcripts’. |
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