This wide-ranging and decidedly international collection of essays offers a fruitful and generative sampling of the strands and sessions on the topic of travel and mobilities at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds in 2010. Generously gathering established scholars as well as emerging voices, the collection in this broadest sense spans the entire Old World of Afro-Eurasia (territorial and maritime networks from the North Atlantic to the Indian Ocean), with Iona McCleery’s informative essay on the circulation of medical knowledge throughout the early Portuguese empire moving beyond medieval Europe per se along axes of both time and space (the discussion extends into the sixteenth century with some discussion of the Americas). Although the editors regretfully note the lack of Byzantine contributions in this collection (xxx), Latin, Scandinavian, Germanic, and Slavic contexts are represented.

In their introduction, the editors wisely signal an awareness of postcolonial approaches that avoid binary distinctions between “self” and “other” and increasingly offer medievalists nuanced frameworks for understanding historical and social phenomena of migration, mobility, and cultural exchange. Nonetheless, this collection shifts its focus away from the more extraordinary or spectacular forms of travel writing that tend to animate literary and cultural analysis regarding mobility (such as the works of Marco Polo or Ibn Battuta) to instead consider more quotidian forms of transit and experiences of everyday life. Revealing the historical depth and variety of short- and long-term travel by pilgrims, soldiers, knights, scholars, clerics, and diplomats, this collection persuasively demonstrates that medieval people were “anything but immobile, unadventurous, or ill-equipped to travel” (xiv).

The essay collection gently works to address some implicit biases and “imbalances” (xxx) in historicist approaches to the medieval past. Even if (as the editors state) “women are unquestionably less visible in this collection than men, and less visible than many would wish” (xxx), for instance, essays by Stefanie Rüther and Maximilian Schuh on elite masculinities (mercenaries in transit and academics in medieval universities) are nonetheless mindful of “different ways of imagining, negotiating, and performing” gender identity (259) and each of these chapters shows how conventional modes of masculinity (hierarchical and domestic) could be adapted, adjusted, and reworked through the formation of new communities and subcommunities in motion. Zita Rohr’s examination of Yolande of Aragon, spouse and co-regent of Duke Louis II, showcases how pervasive itinerant rulership was within an elite Aragonese environment, and Rohr provocatively argues that a careful coordination of roles by the spouses while on the move offers an example of “proactive and practical de-gendered co-rulership” (239).

One of the most fruitful contributions to this collection along the intersections of gender and social class is Irina Metzler’s essay on travel and disability in the Latin West (primarily late medieval England and France). Drawing from a wide array of visual and textual evidence, Metzler offers an excellent overview of how medieval people with physical impairments—especially “orthopedically-impaired people” (108)—engaged in long-distance travel, sometimes with the assistance of physical objects such as crutches, carts, or the “wheelbarrow as an early form of mobility aid” (104), or in coordination with traveling attendants or animals. In addressing motivations for travel (often seeking a shrine for cure or healing) as well as modes of transit, this essay is one among many in this collection that synthesizes social history and engagement with material culture. Taken as a whole, the essays in this collection show how readily social circumstances and interpersonal networks necessary for travel can be unpacked through careful reading of underexamined historical archives as well as creative inference from gaps and lacunae in available records.

Although these varied contributions demonstrate the capacious flexibility of terms such as mobilities or migration, the collection as a whole could have benefited from a clearer articulation of how such key terms were being invoked beyond cursory definitions adapted from the OED (xxvii). Nonetheless, this multifaceted and far-reaching book suggests welcome areas for future exploration in the historicizing and theorizing of medieval migration.