Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Travel as Episteme—an Introductory Journey
- PART I TRANSFORMING THE RIHLA TRADITION: THE SEARCH FOR KNOWLEDGE IN JEWISH, MUSLIM, AND CHRISTIAN TRAVELLERS
- PART II IMAGINING THE EAST: EGYPT, PERSIA, AND ISTANBUL IN MY MIND
- PART III TO THE EAST AND BACK: EXCHANGING OBJECTS, IDEAS, AND TEXTS
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 4 - “Tierras de Egipto”: Imagined Journeys to the East in the Early Vernacular Literature of Medieval Iberia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Travel as Episteme—an Introductory Journey
- PART I TRANSFORMING THE RIHLA TRADITION: THE SEARCH FOR KNOWLEDGE IN JEWISH, MUSLIM, AND CHRISTIAN TRAVELLERS
- PART II IMAGINING THE EAST: EGYPT, PERSIA, AND ISTANBUL IN MY MIND
- PART III TO THE EAST AND BACK: EXCHANGING OBJECTS, IDEAS, AND TEXTS
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
ABSTRACT
This article focuses on portrayals of imagined eastward journeys, specifically those in Egypt, in the three poems that make up Manuscript K-III-4 of the Royal Library of San Lorenzo de El Escorial: the Libro de Apolonio (a romance of nautical adventures in the Eastern Mediterranean), the Vida de madona Santa María Egipciaqua (the hagiography of a sixth-century “holy harlot”), and the Libre dels tres reys d’Orient (a tale whose central focus is the Holy Family's flight to Egypt). This article seeks to untangle the web of signification that produced these imagined Egyptian journeys in the period of the composition of the poems in the mid-thirteenth century and in the period of their compilation into a single manuscript in the late fourteenth century. The historical reality and literary landscape of Iberia changed much in the intervening period and so the reception of the poems would have changed as well. This article contrasts the original place of eastern journeys in the individual poems with their increased importance due to their later interrelation in the context of an Iberian imaginary in which the place of Egypt and the Levant had dramatically expanded.
Keywords: Escorial Manuscript K-III-4, Libro de Apolonio, Vida de Santa María Egipciaca, Libre dels tres reys d’Orient, St. Mary of Egypt, Aragon
TALES OF TRAVEL to unfamiliar lands have captured the imaginations of Spanishlanguage readers for centuries. While “eastern” journeys (those in the Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Far and Middle East) in late medieval and early modern Spanish literature have been an in vogue topic in criticism since the beginning of the new millennium, such journeys imagined prior to the late fourteenth century have remained in relative obscurity. In order to begin to remedy this situation, this article focuses on portrayals of eastward journeys, specifically those in Egypt, in the three poems that make up Manuscript K-III-4 of the Royal Library of San Lorenzo de El Escorial: the Libro de Apolonio (a romance of nautical adventures in the Eastern Mediterranean), the Vida de madona Santa María Egipciaqua (the hagiography of a sixth-century “holy harlot”), and the Libre dels tres reys d’Orient (a tale whose central focus is the Holy Family's flight to Egypt).
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- Remapping Travel Narratives, 1000–1700To the East and Back Again, pp. 89 - 110Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2018