TW/CW: Violence, religious bigotry, executions, talk of illness and death

RATING: 3.5/5

REVIEW: I received a free copy of this audiobook from NetGalley and am voluntarily writing an honest review.

A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages is a history book that describes the different ways that people traveled during the Middle Ages, and the challenges and dangers that such travel involved. While the book is overwhelmingly Eurocentric, it does touch a bit on the travels of people from China and eastern Asia as well.

I enjoyed this book, for the most part. Since travel was overwhelmingly religious for Europeans in the Middle Ages, this biggest part of this book details the route that people took from Western Europe to the Holy Lands, and touches on the stops along the way. I found this to be interesting, but I think a little more diversity would have been interesting to read as well.

The narrator (who has an English accent!) is very good. He sounds interested in the subject matter, and it doesn’t just sound like a college lecture. He is easy to understand and brings the book to life nicely. ( )

A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages was something I though I'd at least enjoy. Advertised as an "odyssey across the medieval world, recounting the advice that circulated among those venturing to the road for pilgrimage," we instead got a dry recounting of individual travellers' lives. Let me explain:

The book is split into roughly thirteen chapters, each exploring a specific place a European traveller might choose to go. The first half focuses almost exclusively on pilgrimage-specific sites and experiences, with the second half opening up to the rest of Africa and Central and Eastern Asia. Each section is buoyed by a person in history's experience of their travels, usually those who left a written account of it.

The first half focuses exclusively on Pilgrimage sites. This is not my shindig, but it might be yours. It is potentially a worthwhile place to learn the context of travel for medieval people during this period, but a lot of the potential joy from it was sucked clean dry from the issues I will discuss later. I found the book more bearable in the second half: finally, we go to places less Europeans had seen and encounter interesting aspects of cultural mixing we often forget about in the period.

So, back to the issues. Beyond the writing being pretty mediocre, the book just felt like a report. This is not a "guide" for contemporary people "travelling" to the Middle Ages, nor is it appropriately framed in its advertising and the introduction for what it really is: a quick look at what Medieval travellers would have expected on their journeys, and what some of them said about it. I would not have necessarily minded this bait-and-switch if it had been thoroughly framed and argued, but alas, it absolutely wasn't.

Each chapter contains a lot of tangential information about the travellers that we "see through," with simply far, far too many places introduced that explaining and contextualizing them appropriately would be a waste of time. Because of this, a lot of the information is surface-level, and much is discussed without a steady sense of why. As mentioned earlier, the little that we are informed of for our "trip" is strictly information that would be known to individuals in the Medieval period. While perhaps a bit entertaining for some, adding a short list of old wives' tales at the end of each chapter felt insulting when each chapter barely gave me enough information to grasp what the hell is actually going on. Bale does not really have a thesis with this work—sure he waxes poetically about travel in the introduction and coda—but regurgitating past traveller's writings and passing it as "guide" is incredibly disingenuous.

TLDR: This is a history of medieval European travellers disguised as a guidebook. Skip the first half. Watch this video instead.

Thank you NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review 🙏 ( )