Bøger af Joan-Pau Rubies

Brings together eleven studies published between 1991 and 2005 that illuminate the impact of travel writing on the transformation of early modern European culture.

This book, first published in 2000, offers a wide-ranging and ambitious analysis of how European travellers in India developed their perceptions of ethnic, political and religious diversity over three hundred years. It analyses the growth of novel historical and philosophical concerns, from the early and rare examples of medieval travellers such as Marco Polo, through to the more sophisticated narratives of seventeenth-century observers - religious writers such as Jesuit missionaries, or independent antiquarians such as Pietro della Valle. The book's approach combines the detailed contextual analysis of individual narratives with an original long-term interpretation of the role of cross-cultural encounters in the European Renaissance. An extremely wide range of European sources is discussed, including the often neglected but extremely important Iberian and Italian sources. However, the book also discusses a number of non-European sources, Muslim and Hindu, thereby challenging simplistic interpretations of western 'orientalism'.

From the twelfth century, a growing sense of cultural confidence in the Latin West was accompanied by the increasing importance of the genre of empirical ethnographies. This anthology of classic articles in the history of medieval ethnographies illustrates this theme.