How to Cite

Valtrová, Jana: Struggling with Fear? Emotions in Medieval Travel Accounts about the Mongols, in Bauer, Martin, Booth, Philip and Fischer, Susanna (Eds.): To Jerusalem and Beyond: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Latin Travel Literature, c.1200-1500, Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2023 (Das Mittelalter. Perspektiven mediävistischer Forschung. Beihefte, Volume 19), p. 93–116. https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.998.c15843

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https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.998
ISBN 978-3-96822-129-8 (PDF)
ISBN 978-3-96822-130-4 (Hardcover)

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07/20/2023

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Authors

Jana Valtrová

Struggling with Fear?

Emotions in Medieval Travel Accounts about the Mongols

Abstract The mendicant travel accounts to Asia, namely those of John of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck, express their fear of the Mongols. The paper demon­strates how understanding such emotional expressions within their travel accounts can help us broaden our un­derstanding of these particular texts. Following Barbara Rosenwein’s theory of emotional communities, the paper suggests distinguishing between two different emotional communities and two systems of feelings that meet, com­bine, and even clash within one travel account – the audi­ence’s emotional community and the traveller’s emotional community. Besides the problem of their mutual interac­tion within one text, the paper also examines expressing emotions in a subordinate position by using James Scott’s theory of ‘hidden transcripts’.