"Albrecht Classen's Tracing the Trails in the Medieval World does for literature what Albert Einstein did for physics with his General Theory of Relativity. Just as Einstein suggested that spacetime is curved by the mass and acceleration of physical bodies and their gravitational forces, Classen allows us to see the constellation that we call the Middle Ages as an event carved out of spacetime by authorial agencies and literary forces, enduring for a thousand years, and still affecting the ways in which we understand our present and our future. Focused on accounts of travel, journeys and movements in real and imagined spaces, by authors and fictional characters, the book establishes the primacy of stepping forth and venturing out, as the acts by which the world and the traveler come into being. Ontology and epistemology, in that way, are posited as effects of the kinetics and the serendipitous meanderings that make them possible in the first place. The four dimensions of spacetime, however, are not the only realms of interest to this study. Just as post-Einsteinian physics has endeavored to establish the existence of dimensions beyond those of sensory perception, Classen too proposes that the metaphorical effects inherent to literary language become passageways into a spiritual dimension, running as it were parallel to the tracks of our own world. Astrophysics translated into literary scholarship, cosmology rendered as cultural history, Tracing the Trails opens up entirely new ways of understanding how literature not only represents, but shapes, the universe in which we live, in effect pre-scripting and blazing the trails of our destinies and identities, also shedding light on the metaphysical and transcendental dimensions of our journeys."
Fidel Fajardo-Acosta
Creighton University
