Anselm Adornes’ Itinerary: Exploring and Representing Spaces of Spirituality through a Textuary Atlas of the Mediterranean World

Mostly famous for its perceptive descriptions of famous landmarks and cultural differences, Anselm Adornes’ account plays with flexible narratives of in-between spaces, evoking both spatial and chronological distance between a web of interconnected locations. In doing so – this chapter argues – Adornes’ account becomes a textual map, delivering a vividly personal interpretation of the world’s organisation striving to include and make sense of both a traditional system of classification, and of a novel understanding of measurable spaces prompted by recent nautical enterprises. Adornes’ double spatial understanding will be compared with more conventional contemporary views, such as that demonstrated by Dominican theologian Felix Fabri’s Evagatorium in Terrae Sanctae (1480s), and in the Mappa Mundi by Burgundian court historian Jean Mansel, in the latter’s Fleur des Histoires (1460s). This chapter also argues that the organisation of Adornes’ account suggests parallels with fifteenth-century written and illustrated texts for virtual pilgrimage - that is, instruments through which pious frustrated travellers could vicariously perform a symbolic pilgrimage to the Holy Land – and that the author might have included a visual aid to be consulted in parallel to the text.