Explorers from Marco Polo to Captain John Smith viewed their travels and discoveries in the light of attitudes they absorbed from the literature of medieval knighthood. Their own accounts, and contemporary narratives (reinforced by the interest of early printers), reveal this interplay, but historians of exploration on the one hand, and of chivalry on the other, have largely ignored this cultural connection. Jennifer Goodman convincingly develops the idea of the chivalric romance as an imaginative literature of travel; she traces the publication of medieval chivalric texts alongside...