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REVIEWS 254 bringing into a single narrative their travels across wide and disparate places. Unlike previous pilgrims, however, the traveler to the Indies could not follow established markers and so had to invent his own (295). The writer’s aim is to place the reader in the situation described so that he feels he is experiencing it too (300). Here is one of the critical claims of the book, namely, that the modern novel has its roots in the search for new worlds that began in this period. The descriptions of the Indies were already breaking with the tradition of medieval rhetoric and the use of Latin, which was showing itself increasingly incapable of describing everyday realities. The new empirical outlook made it necessary that the novel, unlike previous literary genres, situate itself within a concrete time and place (312). García Espada notes that the Indies texts were not addressed to a particular audience and had a wide appeal, but that different readers could approach them with very different purposes in mind. They appealed to those committed to the expansion of the Christian collective, as well as to those who were indifferent to it (364). The conclusion attempts to fit together all the pieces of the puzzle. García Espada says that the underlying unity of the crusade proposals and the Indies texts is the attitude adopted by the subject towards the object; there is a clear delimitation between “We Latins” and “Them” (352–353). At the same time, there is no clear or stable ideological framework, the lack of which is linked to the passage from the existing medieval intellectual tradition to the new, more empirical outlook. According to García Espada, the enormous literary, scientific , and cultural output of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries was due at least in part to the Latin West’s feeling of being “boxed in” by the surrounding world (357). This experience, and the literature it produced, was a key factor in the birth of modernity. Marco Polo y la Cruzada contains much useful analysis of its principal documentary foundation, as well as engaging accounts of mendicant activity in Central Asia, a topic sometimes passed over in works on the crusades and medieval religious history. Its chief failing, as I hope this review has made clear, is stretching its claims too far and ranging too widely across themes, for which dubious generalizations are then made to make the whole picture hang together. For example, García Espada claims that after 1300, Western Europe experienced a decline in the importance of penance and apocalyptic expectations in favor of directing more spiritual energy to the fight against the outside world (360). While there may be pieces of evidence to support this claim, it squares rather poorly with the well-known penitential movements and new apocalyptic theories swirling around the Franciscan controversies and the Great Famine. García Espada is too eager to introduce grand ideas, even in the book’s conclusion , before he has adequately dealt with ones already presented. Marco Polo y la Cruzada does make some noteworthy connections between the Indies texts and the modern novel, but the book falls short in substantiating its claims. SAM ZENO CONEDERA, S.J. Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives, ed. Lisa M. Bitel and Felice Lifshitz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2008) 158 pp. In a new, slim collection of essays, editors Lisa Bitel and Felice Lifshitz, along REVIEWS 255 with four other prominent scholars of the Middle Ages, work to shift the historical lenses long employed to study women and religion in the pre-modern world. As Bitel states in her introductory essay, each of the volume’s contributor ’s “tries to step back from received assumptions about the intersections of religion and gender to consider what, exactly, the terms ‘women,’ ‘man,’ and ‘religious’ mean for historians” (10). The result is a group of well-crafted studies that both paint the historiographical landscape of gender studies and push the field in new directions. Bitel’s brief introduction weaves a tale that follows scholars’ studies of the Middle Ages through to the present. The narrative is enjoyable and engaging (not to...

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