Chivalry and Exploration, 1298-1630

Front Cover
Boydell & Brewer, 1998 - Biography & Autobiography - 234 pages
The literature of medieval knighthood is shown to have influenced exploration narratives from Marco Polo to Captain John Smith.

Explorers from Marco Polo to Captain John Smith viewed their travels and discoveries in the light of attitudes they absorbed from the literature of medieval knighthood. Their own accounts, and contemporary narratives [reinforced by the interest of early printers], reveal this interplay, but historians of exploration on the one hand, and of chivalry on the other, have largely ignored this cultural connection. Jennifer Goodman convincingly develops the ideaof the chivalric romance as an imaginative literature of travel; she traces the publication of medieval chivalric texts alongside exploration narratives throughout the later middle ages and renaissance, and reveals parallel themesand preoccupations. She illustrates this with the histories of a sequence of explorers and their links with chivalry, from Marco Polo to Captain John Smith, and including Gadifer de la Salle and his expedition to the Canary Islands, Prince Henry the Navigator, Cortés, Hakluyt, and Sir Walter Raleigh.

JENNIFER GOODMAN teaches at Texas A & M University.

From inside the book

Contents

Towards the Rediscovery of a Literature
27
The Romance as an Imaginative Literature of Travel
45
the travelers romance
83
native kings and traitor knights
104
Philippa of Lancaster and the chivalry
134
rereading the cartas de relación
149
Ralegh among the Amazons
168
The Captains SelfPortrait Revisited
192
Conclusions
219
Copyright

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