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The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555. Matteo Salvadore. Transculturalisms, 1400–1700. London: Routledge, 2017. xii + 236 pp. $149.95.

writing scholarship, Legassie’s final section pursues the notion of the medieval discovery of the proximate. Noting that many more travel accounts tend to treat short-range journeys after 1350, he focuses on two specific travelers: the prehumanist intellectual Petrarch, whose journeys paradoxically culminate in a rationale for staying put, and Castilian noble Pero Tafur, whose writings attempt to make his journeys conform with existing “courtly ethnographic” and chivalric “adventure” modes (204). While these final chapters are often observant and illuminating accounts of Petrarch’s and Tafur’s texts, at times they read as less closely bound into the concerns of the volume than their forerunners. As Legassie himself points out, that Petrarch “distinguishes himself from most of his contemporaries by resisting the tendency to assimilate literate labor to the art of travel” may partially explain the imperfect fit (15). However, chapter 5’s attempt to explain Petrarch’s attitudes through “the diasporic orientation of his political consciousness” (202) also reads as an underexplored afterthought rather than as central to the chapter’s analysis. Nonetheless, this is a well-researched, thoughtful, and stimulating engagement with an impressively broad range of late medieval travel texts. It benefits particularly from its attention to multiple textual versions across a range of original languages. Legassie’s cultural-historical methods are surefooted; he both situates travel texts in their cultural contexts and uses them to identify previously unrecognized trends in the thought and practice of travel and travel writing. Finally, he tells us a compelling new story about the writing and culture of travel in the later Middle Ages and their hitherto-unrecognized modes of connectivity with prior and later eras, all without lapsing into a teleological narrative. This volume is likely to become essential reading for scholars and students in the field.