Description
THE ENGLISH TRAVELER TO ITALY
The Middle Ages (to 1525)
George B Parks originally published in 1954
Although the road to Rome meant a seven week journey on horseback at best, it was probably never so well traveled by Englishmen as in the years from 110 to 1500. In The English Traveler to Italy, Dr. George B. Parks tells the story of the men and women, from the captured king Caractacus to Reginald Cardinal Pole, cousin of Henry VIII, who undertook the arduous journey.
Dr. Parks, has chose three broad topics around which to build a continuity for his narrative – the product of fifteen years of research. The work, supported by many fine illustrations, is primarily a study of travel literature – such narratives and descriptions as the treatise on the sights of Rome written by Master Gregorius, selections from the Rome guidebooks for pilgrims, a moving poem and a letter by Alcuin, and a part of the first book published by an Englishman in Rome – Robert Flemmyng’s, Meditations at Tivoli.
In order to provide a setting for these documents and to better understand their content, Dr. Parks uses a second topic – the history of travel from England to Italy. The flow of visitors included kings, crusaders, soldier exiles, mercenaries, a pope, archbishops and cardinals, bishops, abbots, and simple priests and friars, students, and a few English merchants. We learn about these varied peoples, the routes they too and the changes in the routes down the years, about the times and seasons, the cost, the hardships and dangers, and about the accommodations.
The travel records give rise to Dr. Parks’s third topic, the cultural interchange between the two countries. He discusses the importing into Britain of the Christian religion, then the later interflow of intellectual currents, such as the influence of Bede in Christian learning, the inspiration which Chaucer drew from Dante and Boccaccio, the Renaissance learning which scholars brought back to England.
This is a reproduction edition from a scanned copy of the original work:
Title The English Traveler to Italy: The Middle Ages (to 1525)
Author George B Parks
Publisher Stanford University Press 1954
ISBN 080473559X, 9780804735599
Tags:
stanford press, george parks, travel, italy, middle ages, 1525, Rome, Italy, Padua, Venice, Bologna, Sicily, canon law, Genoa, Matthew Paris, travel literature, Lucca, Pavia, Bede, Adam of Usk, Pisa, Apulia, John Hawkwood, John of Salisbury, Avignon, Hospice 
