The panel explores the representation and self representation of religious identities in medieval and early modern travel accounts. Throughout the prism of travelogues and travel literature, encounter, dialogue, rejection of religious otherness are discussed. Missionaries, pilgrims, envoys, and merchants – a very much postmodern classification – experience the common themes of absence and solitude, in their travel to a secular or religious promised land. These aspects overlap with the encounter with the different religions in the form of ethnography or wonder, where one’s religion is increasingly an expression of one’s identity in the midst of the diverse.Chair: Marta Addessi (Sapienza Università di Roma) Speakers:Simone Petrillo (Sapienza Università di Roma), “There and Back Again,” Religious Encounters in the Middle Ground: The Case of the Umayyad CórdobaAndrea Amato (FSCIRE), Perception of the Islam in the Golden Hord Crimea: A Reflection on Ibn Battuta’s Travel AccountValentina Bottanelli (FSCIRE), TBAMihai-Dumitru Grigore (Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte), There and Back Again: The Patriarch of Antioch and What the Ottoman Authorities Learned from His Journey to the Orthodox RulersTycho Maas (Utrecht University), Encountering the Other and Facing the Self: Reexamining Early-Modern Religious Discourse through Travelogues from the Cape of Good Hope