Exhibition itinerary : Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Jan. 29-May 31, 1998; University of New Mexico Art Museum, Oct. 13-Dec. 13, 1999; St. Louis Art Museum, Feb. 23-May 23, 1999.

First published in 2000, Trade, Travel, and Exploration: An Encyclopedia covers the people, places, technologies, and intellectual concepts that contributed to trade, travel and exploration during the Middle Ages, from the years C.E. 525 to 1492. This comprehensive reference work contains entries on a large number of subjects, including familiar topics such as the voyages of Columbus and Marco Polo, and also information that is more difficult to find, for example, the traditions of travel among Muslim women and the influence of Viking travel on navigation and geographical knowledge. Bringing together more than 175 scholars from a variety of disciplines, it minimizes Eurocentric bias and offers extensive coverage of such topics as travel within Inner Asia, Mongol society, and the spread of Buddhism. Including an extensive map program and more than 125 illustrations, as well as bibliographies, a comprehensive index and "see also" references, Medieval Trade, Travel, and Exploration is a valuable reference guide for undergraduate and graduate students, scholars and also the general reader.

This volume, the second of three, offers an anthology of Western descriptions of Islamic religious buildings in Syria, Egypt and North Africa, mostly from the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries, taken from travel books and ambassadorial reports. (The third volume will deal with Islamic palaces around the Mediterranean.) As travel became easier and cheaper, thanks to better roads, steamships, hotels and railways, tourist numbers increased, museums accumulated eastern treasures, illustrated journals proliferated, and photography provided accurate data. All three deal with the impact of Western trade, taste and imports on the East, and examine the encroachment of westernised modernism.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.