Natural Materials of the Holy Land and the Visual Translation of Place, 500-1500, focuses on the unique ways that natural materials carry the spirit of place. Since early Christianity, wood, earth, water and stone were taken from loca sancta to signify them elsewhere. Academic discourse has indiscriminately grouped material tokens from holy places and their containers with architectural and topographical emulations, two-dimensional images and bodily relics. However, unlike textual or visual representations, natural materials do not describe or interpret the Holy Land; they are part of it. Tangible and timeless, they realize the meaning of their place of origin in new locations. What makes earth, stones or bottled water transported from holy sites sacred? How do they become pars pro toto, signifying the whole from which they were taken? This book will examine natural media used for translating loca sancta, the processes of their sanctification and how, although inherently abstract, they become charged with meaning. It will address their metamorphosis, natural or induced; how they change the environment to which they are transported; their capacity to translate a static and distant site elsewhere; the effect of their relocation on users/viewers; and how their containers and staging are used to communicate their substance.

Containing more than 600 entries, this valuable resource presents all aspects of travel writing. There are entries on places and routes (Afghanistan, Black Sea, Egypt, Gobi Desert, Hawaii, Himalayas, Italy, Northwest Passage, Samarkand, Silk Route, Timbuktu), writers (Isabella Bird, Ibn Battuta, Bruce Chatwin, Gustave Flaubert, Mary Kingsley, Walter Ralegh, Wilfrid Thesiger), methods of transport and types of journey (balloon, camel, grand tour, hunting and big game expeditions, pilgrimage, space travel and exploration), genres (buccaneer narratives, guidebooks, New World chronicles, postcards), companies and societies (East India Company, Royal Geographical Society, Society of Dilettanti), and issues and themes (censorship, exile, orientalism, and tourism). For a full list of entries and contributors, a generous selection of sample entries, and more, visit the Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia website.

Between Jerusalem and Europe: Essays in Honour of Bianca Kühnel analyses how Jerusalem is translated into the visual and material culture of medieval, early modern and contemporary Europe, and in what ways European encounters with the city have shaped its holy sites. The volume also demonstrates methodological shifts in the study of Jerusalem in Western art by mapping the diversity of concepts that underlie imaginations of the city as an earthly presence and a heavenly realization, as a physical and a mental space, and as a unique location which is multiplied and re-imagined in numerous copies elsewhere. Contributors are Lily Arad, Pnina Arad, Barbara Baert, Neta B. Bodner, Iris Gerlitz, Anastasia Keshman Wasserman, Katrin Kogman-Appel, Ora Limor, Galit Noga-Banai, Robert Ousterhout, Yamit Rachman-Schrire, Bruno Reudenbach, Alessandro Scafi, Tsafra Siew, and Victor I. Stoichita.

Pilgrim and Preacher seeks to understand the numerous pilgrimage writings of the Dominican Felix Fabri (1437/8-1502), not only as rich descriptions of the Holy Land, Egypt, and Palestine, but also as sources for the religious attitudes and social assumptions that went into their creation. Fabri, an Observant reformer and talented preacher, as well as a two-time Holy Land pilgrim, adapted his pilgrimage experiences for four different audiences. He produced the rhymed Swabian-German Pilgerbüchlein for those who sponsored his first voyage; the encyclopaedic Latin Evagatorium for his Dominican brethren; the vernacular Pilgerbuch for the noble patrons of his second voyage and their households; and finally, the vernacular Sionpilger-an 'imagined' or 'virtual' pilgrimage - for the nuns in his care, who were unable to make the real journey themselves. This study asks fundamental questions about the readership for such works, and then builds upon an analysis of Fabri's audiences to reassess the nature of piety, and the place both pilgrimage literature and Observant reform had in it, in late-medieval Germany. Pilgrim and Preacher is a study of reception, yet one that departs from traditional approaches to pilgrimage literature, which see pilgrimage writing merely as a body of texts to be classified according to genre or mined for colourful details about the Jerusalem journey. This work combines the insights of both literary theory and historical studies with an original, empirical contribution based on an analysis of the manuscripts and printed history of Fabri's writings, setting them in their historical and cultural contexts. Such an analysis allows us to understand better the working of the religious imagination amongst urban elites and women religious in the late middle ages. By charting the influences of the Observance Movement within the Dominican, Fabri's writings were intended for both his young novices (to make them more effective preachers) and for the religious women who could only go to Jerusalem via the imagination, Pilgrim and Preacher also makes an important contribution to the history of the Dominican Observance movement and the wider currents that flowed between it and the civic and religious feelings of the age.

Containing more than 600 entries, this valuable resource presents all aspects of travel writing. There are entries on places and routes (Afghanistan, Black Sea, Egypt, Gobi Desert, Hawaii, Himalayas, Italy, Northwest Passage, Samarkand, Silk Route, Timbuktu), writers (Isabella Bird, Ibn Battuta, Bruce Chatwin, Gustave Flaubert, Mary Kingsley, Walter Ralegh, Wilfrid Thesiger), methods of transport and types of journey (balloon, camel, grand tour, hunting and big game expeditions, pilgrimage, space travel and exploration), genres (buccaneer narratives, guidebooks, New World chronicles, postcards), companies and societies (East India Company, Royal Geographical Society, Society of Dilettanti), and issues and themes (censorship, exile, orientalism, and tourism). For a full list of entries and contributors, a generous selection of sample entries, and more, visit the Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia website.