The present study has two major goals: first it reconstructs the history of travel-literature from the Middle Ages to the 19th century with a special focus on the role of women, second it attempts to analyse and evaluate travel-accounts by women who travelled to the Orient in the 19th century (Engel-Egli, Forneris, Pfeiffer, Hahn-Hahn and Muhlbach). / The reconstruction of the history of travel and travel-literature up to the 18th century shows that it was possible for women to travel with relative freedom. With the polarization of gender-roles in the last third of the 18th century, however, women were declared 'unfit for travel' and confined to their homes. Due to this development, travel-accounts by women travelling to the Orient, that were written in the middle of the 19th century, have to fulfil a special function. Besides representing an attempt to reestablish the tradition of female travellers that had been suppressed from the middle of the 18th century on, travelling to the Orient meant that the female authors in question had access to areas and spaces that were both off limits to their male counterparts (i.e. the harem) and charged with sexually connoted images. Forneris,' Pfeiffer's and Hahn-Hahn's statements can be interpreted as a conscious attempt to criticize European man through the deconstruction of the images of the Oriental femme fatale in two ways: the first criticism is that they present themselves as authorities with regard to the domain of the Oriental woman. The second occurs through consciously creating grotesque anti-images, whereby women turn the "oriental dream" of their male contemporaries into a nightmare. This act of turning the images into their opposite happens without taking into account the culturally different woman. She has been reduced to the status of an object by women travelling to the Orient exactly in the same manner as male colleagues reduced them. / In addition, this analysis gives special consideration to much discussed 19th century elements of racial theories which found their way into the travel accounts.

No description available.

This thesis is the first book-length study of Johannes Schiltberger's Reisebuch, the German-language account of the Bavarian crusader's approximately 30-year captivity and enforced travels in the Middle East under the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I (r. 1389-1403), the Turko-Mongolian warlord Timūr (r. 1370-1405) and his successors. It investigates the Reisebuch's representation of the Orient. My reexamination of the manuscript and print transmission from c. 1450 to 1600 has shown that there were various versions of the Reisebuch in circulation, and I base my reading of the work on this basic multiplicity and variety. This variance is pertinent for a literary interpretation of the Reisebuch because the manifest narrative and material transformations go hand in hand with differing thematic foci, narratological and representational strategies, so that one can confidently contend each version of the Reisebuch negotiates a distinct relationship with the eastern 'other'. I argue that the transmission diverges into three strands as (1) an abridged chronicle that emphasises the complexity of political and military relations in the East; (2) a proto-ethnographic account with a focus on religious diversity; and (3) six paratextual reconceptualisations of the Reisebuch as Turcica in early print. In short, my study engages with the transmission and transformation of material, on the one hand, and with the consequences of this creative process for cultural ideas, on the other: it asks what role 'rewriting' - deliberate and inventive adaptation - plays in the Reisebuch's portrayals of the East. My thesis therefore provides not only the first in-depth reading of Schiltberger's Reisebuch as a 'medieval multi-text' (a term coined by Iain Macleod Higgins to indicate the inter-textuality and intra-textuality common to the medieval travel account) but highlights its representational process as multiple, polyvocal and dynamic.