Though I can’t claim that sort of familial connection to my subject matter, I do now think that I have to confess another kind of familial debt. My grandfather passed away a week ago, and though I wouldn’t have realized it on my own, I think that he played an important role in my formation as a historian. Both in my research and in my teaching, I’m fascinated by the way that people assimilate the new knowledge gained from travel and autopsy to the knowledge they previously had—or thought they had—on the basis of oral and textual tradition. While glossy brochures from study abroad programs routinely promise that the experience of different cultures will “broaden one’s mind/horizons,” I am less certain that travel is ever such a uniformly mind-expanding experience. For tourist sites must disappoint as often as they gratify, and foreign cultures must also offend or provoke as often as they educate. Going abroad is a complicated experience, which answers questions and quiets doubts as often as it raises them.

My grandfather served in World War II, and I remember that of all of the things that we talked about over the years, it was his experience in Northern Italy (in and around Livorno, aka Leghorn) that I remember most vividly. Like hundreds of thousands of his fellow soldiers, my grandfather lived most of his life in small town America—with the one glaring exception of a few months, or even a few years, spent in Europe, Africa, or the Pacific islands. I still remember thinking the first time that I heard him talking about his service how strange it would be to see my grandfather—whom I strained to picture outside of Snyder County, PA, let along across an ocean—sleeping out in the fields of Tuscany. And yet that’s exactly what he was doing as an 18- or 19-year-old. I wouldn’t presume to say what, exactly, the experience meant to him; but suffice it to say that it taught him as much about the superiority of the American way as it did about the charm of espresso. I’m sure that it was mind-expanding to encounter a foreign culture, but it was also a self-ratifying experience that confirmed that the homeland that had sent him there to fight for that foreign culture’s liberty was about as good as it gets. (I daresay that he never changed his mind, which made recent American foreign relations a heated topic!)

I’m not sure about the methodological soundness of it, but I know that every time I read a medieval or early modern travel account, I think of my grandfather in Italy. Historians are always tempted to find rupture and change, to be blinded by the flash of something new or different in their sources. Historical travel accounts are most interesting when they reveal the impact of the New, Different, and Other, right? When we can see Europeans transformed by their encounter with foreign peoples? I’m not so sure. The questions that I ask of my sources have at least as much to do with what struck my travelers as merely… different; perhaps even… disappointing. The marks that such seemingly anticlimactic experiences leave on travelers are deeply significant, but they often go unnoticed. Not unlike my grandfather’s influence on me, actually.