The Medieval Traveller (review)

Reviews 225 Ohler, Norbert, The Medieval Traveller, trans. Caroline Hillier, Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 1995; paper; pp. xv, 245; R.R.P. £25.00, US$45.00. Norbert Ohler provides a useful, brisk, survey of medieval travel through a series of brief chapters on well-chosen topics, and a rather less successful anthology of medieval travel narratives. The book has special strengths in its attention to Central Europe, the non-Christian inhabitants of Europe and the Mediterranean region, and the early Middle Ages. The use of sources causes occasional unease, but this is as nothing to the inexplicable decision to put out an English translation without any notes and references or an index; the illustrations are also printed with no indication of provenance. The original German edition (Reisen im Mittelalter, Miinchen, Artemis Verlag, 1986) contains an index, rather gallingly referred to on p. vii of the present translation, and, presumably, a full discussion of sources (no copy of the German edition is held, apparently, in Australia or N e w Zealand). Part I, 'Background and Conditions', is at its best in a consideration of the physical conditions and circumstances of travel. A general discussion of European topography, for instance, shows why water travel was so important. Ohler also explains why it was rational for medieval Europeans to allow the Roman roads to decay: designed for military use, they were of questionable utility for bulk transportation, but excessively inviting to invaders (p. 22). Rather less successful are such chapters as "The Importance of Religion, Trade and Communications for Travel', and 'Communications on the Way', in which travelling is, or should be, set in a larger human context. The problem here, apart from a lack of space, is that travel is studied as though it were an autonomous activity, rather than having motives in a network of human purposes and needs. Ohler does make occasional references to the Odyssey, apparently intending an anthropological perspective, with such surprising conclusions as 'a stranger could also be seen as a god' (p. 79; Matthew 10.40 is also cited). Whilst this seems unlikely for the Middle Ages (or for the actuality of ancient Greece), it does raise the issue of the complexity of the encounter with the xenos, and one could wish for some study of how frequently strangers were welcomed without ulterior motive. In a book on medieval travel intended for the general reader, one might reasonably hope for either an attempt to convey the experiential actuality of travel in the Middle Ages (using, perhaps, the imaginative techniques of the historical novelist), or an attempt to place travel in some cultural-politicalcommercial -historical context (as some would say, a theorising of the 226 Reviews subject). For the former, Margaret W a d e Labarge is more successful, though, as her marvellously soap-opera subtitle makes clear, she is concerned with a more restricted social range than Ohler (Medieval Travellers: The Rich and the Restless, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1982). For the latter, J. J. Jusserand tells a story in which travel is an important factor in a movement towards roughly democratic reform in England in the fourteenth century, by the entirely plausible mechanism that it is through widespread travel that ordinary people came to realise that they had shared grievances, and organised for effective action (English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages, trans. L. Toulmin Smith, London, Unwin, 1889). Jusserand's work might be renovated as a study in information flow. But a broad scope can lead away from the study of travel to a study of the concerns which took people travelling, and Jusserand's work constantly threatens to become a general social history. Ohler avoids, perhaps excessively, this tendency. W e might hope to find some of the actuality of travel in Part 2, 'Descriptions of Travel in the Middle Ages'. Unfortunately, Ohler here presents us with commented paraphrases of narratives, rather than the narratives themselves. Many of these descriptions certainly need commentary, but the reader is presented with accounts of accounts, with glossing that can take the edge off the alterity of the experience. Ohler is, for instance, eager to justify the use of wine by members of the Boniface mission: 'water...