‘In a sixty-page introduction that would delight Borges and Amitav Ghosh alike, Hamilton narrates Wansleben’s life and guides the reader through his travel report. Wansleben published two accounts of Egypt, the first in Italian in 1671 and the second, more significant one, in French in 1677. Johann Michael Wansleben’s Travels in the Levant offers an original Italian-language version of the second report, never before printed, and also includes explanatory notes, maps, appendices and a glossary, as well as reproductions of Wansleben’s beautiful illustrations’. Alexander Bevilacqua in Journal of Ecclesiastical History,70, 2019, pp. 651-653

[…early modern travel does not come more exhilarating than Hamilton’s Johann Michael Wansleben’s Travels in the Levant. [… our German traveller provides not only a personal, immediate account of his journey’s fortunes and misfortunes, but his frequent asides to his reader–which seem too intimate to be addressed to his royal patron–involve us as much today as this journal would have enthralled seventeenth century readers: sans TV, sans internet, sans Instagram… Wansleben transcends these fast-paced media and provides us with an accessible, informative, detailed and somewhat divisive, humorous travelogue from which both the contemporary scholar and the amateur reader has much to learn’. Cleo Cantone in The Muslim World Book Review, 39:2, 2019, pp.12-16