GoingToMeet

Images, imagination and the written word shaped medieval perceptions of the world just as much as direct experience and observation. By writing their own accounts, pilgrim authors re-encoded holy writ into a new framework of the holy places. Secular writings, architectural recreations of faraway buildings and artistic representations of journeys in illuminated manuscripts fed ideas about the world 'out there', while bringing the 'out there' very much into the realm of the 'right here'. Likewise, images, sagas, ballads, and travellers' tales changed, and were changed by, real-world experience.

This one-day symposium will bring together scholars in several disciplines to discuss how those throughout the middle ages chose to portray the reality they encountered—and constructed—through travel, whether in their own journeys or in journeys made by others.