A Travel Guide to the Middle Age – Book of the Week

Bale, Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge and a scholar who has previously translated both Mandeville’s Book of Marvels and The Book of Margery Kempe, draws on a rich archive of previously untranslated primary sources — accounts from travellers as far-flung as Turkey, Iceland, Armenia, North Africa, and Russia — to reconstruct the medieval experience of being on the road. The book is structured broadly as a journey outward from Western Europe: through the ruins of Rome (more rubble than tourist attraction by the fourteenth century), across the Mediterranean to Mamluk-controlled Jerusalem, eastward through Persia and Tabriz, and eventually to the court of China and the imagined margins of the known world, including the Antipodes and the ends of the earth.

This is not, however, a straightforward itinerary. Bale blurs the boundary between real and imagined geography as the medieval travellers themselves did, taking their worldview on its own terms rather than correcting it from a modern vantage point. Alongside practical travellers’ intelligence — what to eat, how to behave, how to guard against thieves — the book accommodates the full range of medieval geographical imagination: the rumoured islands where gems grow from giant canes, the monsters at the world’s edge, the fantastical encounters that medieval readers expected and demanded.

Who it’s for

This is the ideal read for anyone fascinated by everyday medieval life, by the history of travel, or by the texture of how pre-modern people understood and moved through the world; it may frustrate those in search of strict military or political history, since the emphasis here falls squarely on experience and imagination over event.

A Behind-the-Scenes Gem

One of the quiet pleasures of the book is how seriously it takes previously overlooked non-European voices. Alongside familiar figures from the Western pilgrimage tradition, Bale incorporates the accounts of travellers from Armenia, Russia, North Africa, and Turkey — many drawn from sources that have never appeared in English translation. The result is something genuinely unusual in popular medieval history: a book that allows readers to see Western Europe from the outside, through the eyes of visitors who found it quite as strange and wondrous as Europeans found the East.

One of the most striking passages covers Rome — described in the publisher’s own summary of the book as “more ruin than tourist spot.” Medieval pilgrims arriving in the Eternal City expecting imperial grandeur instead found themselves picking their way through a landscape of collapsed monuments and overgrown stone. The city was still, somehow, the holiest destination in the West. That gap between expectation and reality — the ruin that remained sacred — is exactly the kind of friction Bale is interested in throughout the book.

Verdict

A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages is one of those books that rewards slowness. It does not drive towards an argument so much as accumulate a world, and readers who come to it expecting a conventional narrative arc may find the episodic structure initially disorienting. But that is, in a real sense, the point. This is what travelling in the Middle Ages actually felt like: fragmentary, surprising, punctuated by moments of extraordinary vividness and stretches of arduous nothing.

What makes the book exceptional is Bale’s success in inhabiting the medieval outlook rather than translating it. His handling of the sources is both scholarly and humane — he never condescends to his travellers, never reduces their beliefs to mere superstition, and never loses the human thread beneath the historical detail. The result is a portrait of a world that was genuinely global in its imagination, even when its geography was fantastically wrong.

Named a New Yorker Best Book of 2024 and praised by scholars from Harvard to Cambridge, this is the kind of history writing that earns its reputation. For readers of this site, it sits comfortably alongside Ian Mortimer’s Time Traveller’s Guide series as essential popular medieval history — vivid, source-led, and willing to sit with the strangeness of the past rather than explain it away.