This was really fascinating! I love the middle ages and read a lot of historical fiction but those are usually about royalty who traveled regularly. So interesting to learn it from a non-fiction perspective.

I really enjoyed listening to this audiobook. My favorite time is the Middle Ages and as an amateur historian I found this fascinating. The voice actor did a fabulous job, his voice was perfect. The descriptions were wonderful and I loved the side stories, it really added to the enjoyment of the title. I definitely recommend this book /audiobook to persons that enjoy the Medieval Times especially those that are interested in pilgrims that journey on various pilgrimages to holy sites.

I thought this would be interesting but I didn't think it would be fun. This book answered a lot of questions I didn't even know I had: How did people get permission to travel? How did they change money? Why were they traveling around?
The stories woven throughout were so interesting, although some were horrifying. The most shocking thing to me was when it was talking about how, while people knew that traveling was dangerous, there were people who actually felt they earned spiritual credit for suffering (so many pilgrimages!). I had never thought about how dangerous it could be if you were traveling by boat and didn't get wind for weeks.
I had trouble with the accent at first -- it's just a personal thing where I have to get used to British accents -- but once I did, I loved the narration. He was really able to emphasize words in such a way that it was easier to understand a lot of information quickly.
While I really enjoyed this and may revisit it, I also think it would be really cool to have a print edition with maps and photos.
Thanks to NetGalley for letting me listen to this audiobook

I kind of lost interest and only half listened to it after a while, thought it sounded up my alley but just wasn't it.

The book is wonderful and the narration absolutely fantastic. Very dynamic for a non fictional book, which makes it a real pleasure to read and to hear. Eshal Ali did a great job!

This is a very in depth guide to the Middle Ages. It contains detailed descriptions of what a traveler would see, including people, places, and things.

I think a physical copy of the book with its maps and illustrations would enhance the enjoyment this audiobook, but there is plenty to enjoy just with your ears.

Huge thank you to NetGalley and RB Media for the opportunity to enjoy this audiobook!

The narrator was good. I enjoy listening to non-fiction and this was easy to follow in an audio format.

A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: The World through Medieval Eyes by Anthony Bale was very well written. The edition reviewed was the audio version, narrated by Esh Alladi. Esh Alladi was a perfect selection for the narrator role for this audiobook.

I enjoy travel and I also like to mix in a non-fiction into my reading. In the middle ages, folks traveled to trade and for religious pilgrimages. So there are quite a few religious references (which, in my opinion, kudos to the author for blending everything so seamlessly into this book.

I found A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages very enjoyable and educational.

Thank you to NetGalley and publisher Tantor Audio for approving my request to review the audiobook in exchange for an honest review. Publication date is Apr 23, 2024. 11 hours.

Well written guide to middle-age traveling for the modern casual historian. A bit dry, but well-researched and full of detail.

I absolutely loved the premise of this book. What better way to learn about the middle ages stepping in the shoes of the mediaeval traveller!

Full of interesting information and history from across the known world during the middle ages, this book was very interesting to listen to, and also a little bit overwhelming.

The narration by Esh Alladi the feel of the book perfectly, and provided a casual and friendly reading. The only complaint I would have about narration, has nothing to do with the narrator and solely with the style of the book which didn’t lend that well to narration. I can imagine if I could see the book there would be different spots where you’re jumping to different captions, and elements of the story. I had a book to look along with it would’ve felt, like it had a better flow than just listening to it.

Overall, I did enjoy this book and found it to be a good listen, even though the depth of the information and the jumping points did make it somewhat hard to stay focussed.

I love learning more information about the past! This book really gives a variety of different subjects to learn about .

This was quite a fun listen! It's interesting how as much has travel has changed, it hasn't changed at all, really. It's tiring, inconvenient, expensive, fraught with perils and you just don't know what to expect in foreign lands. Thankfully, no one killed me immediately when I choked on some watermelon the other day!

The narrator was great, easy to listen to and proficient with the foreign pronunciations. A++

3.75 stars. A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages by Anthony Bale is an interesting read about the first travel guides used during the Middle Ages obviously! The advice, warnings, and stories of the travelers’ experiences is definitely worth exploring. How did they change money, avoid sea sickness and mythical creatures? It’s in the book. It’s an interesting journey learning what was known/unknown and completely misunderstood about travel to foreign lands. It is a little long but otherwise enjoyed. Thank you Net Galley for my advanced copy.

Bit of a disappointment. I expected from the title that this would be more in the vein of Ian Mortimer’s “Time Travellers Guides”. It is, however, more of a history of travel and travellers in the Medieval era. Sometimes interesting, sometimes plodding. The audiobook is a MUCH better format for enjoying the book than the print.

I requested "A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages" with some trepidation, eased by the sight of the rainbow flag on Anthony Bale's Twitter profile, and boy am I glad I went for it, because it's been a pleasure and a fascination from start to finish.

The "guide" is structured by following, to begin with, the course of a pilgrimage from Western Europe to Jerusalem, as seen through the eyes of multiple travelers. And then -- onward!

Early on, Bale remarks that "the fouler the journey, the richer the prose," and medieval journeys were without exception foul, so he had a lot of pungent material to work with. He has the gifted historian's skill of finding the life and the humor in sources that seem remote to us, and of bringing out our commonalities, as when, in inventorying one prosperous traveler's luggage, he mentions "the fanatical spending on the trivial that is a hallmark of preparing to travel."

To take another example, you might not think that currency equivalences are the stuff of hilarity, but the list Bale runs through, of the currencies and exchanges that would arise during a trip from Canterbury to Rome, made me laugh till I cried. Ditto the "Maniere de la Langue," a French-language guide for English-speakers, which he quotes at length; I shall always be grateful for the advice to wash my legs thoroughly so as to keep off the fleas hopping about under the rush floor mats in my inn.

I should add that Bale doesn't shy away from the frankly hideous aspects of his travelers' experiences -- people traveled in groups if at all possible, because of the potential for robbery and, of course, for women, the likelihood of sexual assault. Travelers encountered events that were beyond hideous and somewhere into unspeakably awful, such as the torture and murder, on Rhodes, of (if I remember correctly) more than a hundred Turkish prisoners. So parts of "A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages" make ghastly listening. Consider yourself warned.

Horrors and all, moments when the narrative sags are few and brief. I almost never found myself less than riveted, and when I had to pause my listening for whatever reason, I did so reluctantly. Special props to Esh Alladi, the narrator, whose delivery is by turns drily amused and grave and whose handling of "foreign" terms and names was smooth and accurate as far as my familiarity with them enabled me to judge. I think I wailed only once, when he pronounced "cache" like "cachet." Noooooooooooo!

Many thanks to Tantor Audio and NetGalley for the ARC.

A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: The World Through Medieval Eyes by Anthony Bale is the best kind of nonfiction books: it used primary sources strung together to make an entertaining, as well as informative book.

When I first picked up this book, I wasn’t sure if it would be a book on what it’s like to live in the Middle Ages (like time travel guide), or what it was like to travel during the Middle Ages. It was a delightful surprise to find that it was rather like both at once, in that an immersive description of what life was like surrounding the theme of traveling in various places on earth during the Middle Ages.

I love the often not-covered insight on places not in Western Europe and the views regarding what most people thought the earth looked like. I love the descriptions of the political climate, the foods, the attire, and the quirky and unique bits of places like Istanbul/Constantinople, Hormoz, and Japan.

This is definitely a book to buy if you want to be amused and learn more about the past. It’s a gateway book into nonfiction to fall in love with!

Thank you so much to NetGalley and RB Media for this audio ARC!!

This was an interesting take on a broad and well trodden subject. Traveling during the late Middle Ages obviously took a lot more commitment than it does now, but it was interesting to see the reasons behind travel during that time (pilgrimage, trade, adventure), and how the world started to adapt and accommodate to the new travelers. New jobs and businesses developed, certain cities gained importance, and one person traveling to a more remote location could impact how the entire Western world understood different cultures. Since it was an audiobook, I can’t verify the bibliography or if there are any footnotes, but it was written in a highly engaging and entertaining manner.

This one sits on the boundary of academic and popular - particularly in audio form, where the narration undercuts phrasing that likely comes across more casually in print. It's a great concept, and just about perfectly executed - particularly in the sections that mimic the format of modern travel guides, since you definitely come away with the knowledge that some things about travel are actually pretty timeless. Everyone wants to know if we're there yet, tourist traps are always even more expensive than you budgeted for, and after a while, you really start to miss your own bed.

You'll probably enjoy it even more if you've been to some of the locations yourself - some of them have changed surprisingly little in the last millennium. The book follows a Eurocentric order - we start with the reasons why people chose to travel in the first place, then go over the preparations necessary before starting out. Once we hit the road, we roughly move across Europe and the middle east from northwest to southeast, starting with the Camino de Santiago and proceeding to Rome, Istanbul, Jerusalem, and beyond. There's even a brief discussion of how visitors from other places reviewed their visits to northern Europe, then we head for home and find out what happened to some of our narrators after their travels.

To some extent, anyone who has ever traveled will enjoy this - but it makes particularly timely reading for anyone planning (or just back from!) a trip to any of the places mentioned.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.

Thank you NetGalley for the chance to listen to this audiobook in advance. I’m giving it a 2 star rating because it truly wasn’t what I was expecting at all and I could not, for the life of me, get into this book, but I did find some things to be interesting. Please take this rating with a grain of salt as I did not finish this audiobook.

History is a fascinating thing for me, and the title of this book sounded really good and the description was really intriguing, but at 20% it was not at all what I was expecting. Some of the topics mentioned in the beginning were intriguing and interesting, I especially enjoyed learning about the first globe to be made in Germany (known), and was hoping that the rest of the book would be on similar topics of travel-related stories or discoveries or inventions throughout the medieval ages, but it was very much not that. Perhaps later in the book it does get back to this, but it was more like a travel blog of experiences of ordinary people throughout the Middle Ages - which, while in the title and should have been obvious - I guess I was just expecting something completely different than what this was, and that’s on me. It is an interesting and intriguing idea to write on the average person’s experiences with traveling back in the Middle Ages, why they were doing so and arriving at their final destination, but the few stories I did get through did drag on a bit for me and I did find my attention straying which ultimately led to me DNFing.

The author, Anthony Bale, does seem to have done a proper job of researching all of these different topics, years and people and the narrator, Esh Alladi did a good job of narrating. If history is your thing, and you’re looking for insight into ordinary people and their experiences with traveling back during the Middle Ages, please do give this book/audiobook a shot! There are some interesting things discussed in the beginning and I’m sure as the book progresses this continues.

Again, thank you NetGalley for the opportunity to listen to this audiobook in advance!

Possible tagline for this book: Medieval Travelers, they’re just like us!

So much information but delivered in a methodical way. I don’t expect I will remember much of the details of this incredibly well researched book, but that’s ok. I enjoyed listening to the foibles and travails of medieval travelers while the author related their struggles to those of the modern traveler. This books focuses on Europeans traveling abroad, but the last chapter covered non-Europeans traveling to medieval Europe which was refreshing.

The narrator does an excellent job keeping the text moving and compelling.

Tantor Audio provided this audiobook for review via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.