Teaching & Learning Guide for: ‘Nowhere is a Place’: Travel Writing in Sixteenth‐Century England
Authors: Mitsi Evi 
Published: July 2008

Author's Introduction

In recent years, critical interest has centered on the neglected area of early modern travel writing, rediscovering forgotten and marginalized texts and placing them in the context of current debates and theories on race, ethnicity, and gender. In late sixteenth‐century and early seventeenth‐century England, the emergent popularity of travel accounts shows that the book as an integral part of the voyage has the power to inform and instruct not only by describing foreign places and peoples but also by reflecting the criteria travelers use consciously or unconsciously to judge another culture. English travelers presented their adventures together with information on geographical areas with their moral attributes, human societies, and cultures, linking them to questions of nationality and race. Travel literature satisfied the public's unfulfilled interest in the wider world, an interest also evidenced by the proliferation of travel plays performed in the London playhouses during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

The course examines a diversity of texts that encompass England's colonial aspirations, quixotic voyages, mercantile records, and responses to a new global system of differences. These texts also present how travel writing, as a discourse designed to describe and interpret the Other for its readers, became increasingly identified with power, with European interests to influence or even control the non‐European world. They also document the rise of English commercial and colonial objectives and the consolidation of national identity resulting from the encounter with the Other.

Author Recommends:

Andrew Hadfield, ed., Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels: Travel and Colonial Writing in English, 1550–1630: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

A broad anthology of travel and colonial writing in the English Renaissance with a helpful instruction by the editor, as well as a chronology and full bibliography. The extracts from mainly English travelers are grouped geographically and prefaced by headnotes, which supply information on the authors and draw the readers’ attention to relevant areas of debate. The selections include narratives of ‘discovery’ of the New World, accounts of cultures already known to the English audience through trade links, such as the Ottoman Empire, of European countries, extending from Ireland to Russia, and of faraway places, such as Africa and the Far East.

Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna Singh, eds., Travel Knowledge: European ‘Discoveries’ in the Early Modern Period (Basingstoke/New York, NY: Palgrave, 2001).

Travel Knowledge examines European travel writing from 1500 to 1800 and includes both critical essays and the primary texts to which they refer, which is an original and useful idea. Unlike most collections of essays on early modern travel, the focus here is on travel to the East Indies, Africa, and the Levant (instead of the New World), while both selections and essays present lesser‐known texts and travelers.

Peter C. Mancall, ed., Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery: An Anthology (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006).

Mancall's rich and valuable anthology places selections from the travels of Europeans like Columbus, Vespucci, Raleigh, and Lery together with those of non‐European authors, such as a Ming admiral, a Moroccan ambassador, a Mogul emperor, and an Inca lord, offering a global perspective on travel in the early modern world. This juxtaposition succeeds in presenting a more nuanced view of early modern contact between cultures. The anthology also includes rare pictures from sixteenth‐century printed books and a lengthy introduction, which discusses the recent work on early modern travel in order to explain the historical circumstances that promoted a eurocentric narrative of encounter.

Gerald MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720 (Basingstoke/New York, NY: Palgrave 2004).

MacLean's lively and enjoyable book presents the travels of four Englishmen to the Ottoman Empire in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at a time when British commercial and political interests in the region were on the rise. The accounts of the four travelers, Thomas Dallam, an organ maker and musician from Lancashire; William Biddulph, a Protestant clergyman; Sir Henry Blount, a rich gentleman traveler; and Mr. T. S., supposedly an English merchant taken captive by the Turks, provide fascinating cross‐cultural encounters. MacLean's aims at capturing ‘Englishness in the making’, by showing that English attitudes towards the Ottoman Empire in the early modern period were not uniformly hostile but variable.

Anthony Padgen, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994).

Padgen's socio‐cultural study of the ‘discovery’ of the New World and its effect on the Old, combines literary criticism and intellectual history in its analysis of European attempts (from Columbus to Alexander von Humboldt) to understand the meaning of the New World. Using a variety of cultural products – letters, histories, philosophy, dialogues, and fiction, Pagden discusses a wide range of contradictory European ideas about America, from how Europeans thought about the New World itself and how they represented its inhabitants to efforts of understanding themselves and their own culture in light of the discovery.

Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1992).

Greenblatt's influential analysis of the European encounter with America examines the ways in which Europeans of the late Middle Ages and the early modern period represented non‐European peoples. By reading travel narratives, judicial documents, and official reports together, Greenblatt shows that Columbus and others used the experience of the marvelous to appropriate other peoples and cultures and colonize their lands.

Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing 400–1600 (Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press, 1988).

Mary Campbell's lively and readable book surveys exotic travel writing in Europe from late antiquity to the age of discovery. Looking at many travel accounts, from pilgrims and crusaders to the writings of Marco Polo, Columbus, and Walter Raleigh, Campbell emphasizes their variety and interest, arguing that travel literature contributed to the formation of the modern novel and the modern life sciences.

Online Materials:

http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/rbm/kislak

This excellent online exhibit by the Library of University of Pennsylvania is entitled ‘Cultural Readings: Colonization and Print in the Americas’. Divided into six thematic categories, it contains illustrations from travel accounts of the Americas, scholarly essays on topics related to the exhibition and a brief bibliography and list of Web links. Originating from two exhibitions of rare printed and manuscript materials, ‘Cultural Readings’ reviews the complex history of the encounter between Europe and America. Illustrations by Theodor de Bry, Columbus, Grynaeus and Huttich, Champlain, and Montanus, provide a broad sample of the printed images circulating in Europe in the Renaissance.

http://www.newberry.org/elizabeth/exhibit/europeamerica

This exhibit by the Newberry Library, entitled ‘Elizabeth: Ruler and Legend’ includes a slideshow of illustrations from Thomas Hariot's A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (Frankfurt, 1590). The account by the renowned mathematician Hariot recording the fate of Sir Walter Raleigh's 1585 colony at Roanoke Island was illustrated with engravings based on the eyewitness drawings of John White. The exhibit also presents a slideshow of Theodor De Bry's Brevis Narratio Americæ[Brief Narration of America] (Frankfurt, 1590), an immensely popular book with engravings depicting images of America's imagined and exotic inhabitants.

http://www.hakluyt.com

This is a useful selection of early Hakluyt Society publications, largely from the First Series and dating from 1847 to the 1860s, which has been digitized by Google Books. The list of texts by explorers includes only those titles available in ‘full view’, which can be read online or downloaded as a pdf file.

http://www.luminarium.org/renlit

The site focuses on sixteenth‐century English authors, including Sir Walter Raleigh, Roger Ascham and Thomas Nashe, providing biographies, editions of their works, such as Raleigh's The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana (1595), Ascham's The Scholemaster (1570), and Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) (extracts of which will be discussed in this course), as well as online articles and essays.

http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/applied_history/tutor/eurvoya

An online tutorial on the history of exploration, entitled ‘The European Voyages of Exploration’, created by the Applied History Research Group at the University of Calgary. This tutorial introduces students to the two pioneering nations, Portugal and Spain, which initiated the European discovery of sea routes that were the first channels of interaction between all of the world's continents, their motivations, their actions, and the consequences of their colonization. It examines the geographical, technological, economic, political, and cultural patterns of that era, providing not only information but also audiovisual material, bibliography, and links to other Internet sources.

http://www.libs.uga.edu/darchive/hargrett/maps

The Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia has a collection of maps of the world dating from 1544 to 1688, available online, which provides a graphic resource in re‐discovering the minds and movements of early explorers.

http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/16century/topic_2/welcome.htm

The thematic unit ‘Renaissance Explorations, Travel and the World Outside Europe’ (online resources of the Norton Anthology of English Literature) includes an overview to the topic, discussing the ways in which Elizabethans used encounters with other cultures as a means of defining themselves, links to other Web resources, and extracts from European travelers, such as Arthur Barlowe (The First Voyage Made to Virginia), George Peckham (A True Report of the Late Discoveries), Jean de Léry (History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil), Ralph Fitch and Peter Mundy (Observations of India), etc.

Syllabus:

Topics for Lecture & Discussion

Week I: Introduction & Overview/Theories on Travel

Reading:

Mary Baine Campbell, ‘Travel Writing and its Theory’, in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, eds. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 261–79.

Evi Mitsi, ‘“Nowhere is a Place”: Travel Writing in Sixteenth‐Century England’, Literature Compass 2.1 (2005), doi: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2005.00135.x.

Debates on Travel

Reading:

Extracts from Jerome Turler's The Traveiler (1575), William Bourne's A Treasure for Traveilers (1578), Roger Ascham's The Scholemaster (1570), and Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (1594).

Weeks II–III: Europe

Reading:

Robert Dallington, from The View of France (1604).

Sir Charles Somerset, Travel Diary (1611–12) [Observations of Paris and Florence].

Fynes Moryson, from An Itinerary Containing His Ten Yeeres Travell (1617) [Observations of Italy and Ireland].

Weeks IV–V: The Levant

Reading:

Thomas Dallam, from The Diary of Master Thomas Dallam (1599–1600) [Observations of Constantinople].

Read also Gerald MacLean's discussion of Dallam's adventure in The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720 (Basingstoke/New York, NY: Palgrave 2004), 1–47.

William Biddulph, from The Travels of Foure Englishmen and a Preacher into Africa, Asia, Troy, Bythinia, Thracia, and the Blacke Sea (1609) [Observations of Athens].

George Sandys, from A Relation of a Journey Begun An. Dom. 1610 (1615) [Observations of the Greeks and the Turks].

Weeks VI–VIII: Africa

Reading:

The Voyage Made by M. John Hawkins . . . to the coast of Guinea, and the Indies of Nova Hispania (1564).

John Leo (Africanus), from The History and Description of Africa, trans. John Pory (1600) [Observations of North Africans].

Read also O. Zhiri, ‘Leo Africanus's Description of Africa’, in Kamps and Singh, eds., Travel Knowledge: European ‘Discoveries’ in the Early Modern Period (Basingstoke/New York, NY: Palgrave, 2001), 258–67.

Extracts from the journals of John Hearne and William Finch, merchants aboard the Red Dragon in 1607.

Weeks IX–X: The East and the South Sea Islands

Reading:

Francis Petty, ‘The admiral and prosperous voyage of Thomas Cavendish into the South Sea, and from thence round about the circumference of the whole earth’ (1586–88) [Observations on the South Sea Islanders].

Sir Henry Middleton, Two Accounts of his Voyage to the Moluccas (1604–6).

Thomas Roe, from The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul 1615–1619.

Thomas Coryate, from Thomas Coriate, Traueller For the English Wits (1616).

Read also: M. G. Aune, ‘Elephants, Englishmen and India: Early Modern travel Writing and the Pre‐Colonial Movement’, Early Modern Literary Studies 11.1 (May 2005): 4.1–35 <http://purl.oclc.org/emls/11‐1/auneelep.htm>.

Weeks XI–XIII: Americas

Reading

Sir Humphrey Gilbert, from Discourse of Discoverie for a New Passage to Cataia (1576).

George Peckham, ‘A true report of the late discoveries . . . of the Newfound Lands’ (1583).

Thomas Harriot, from A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588, 1590).

Sir Walter Ralegh, from The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, Beautiful Empire of Guiana (1596).

Also read: Mary C. Fuller, Voyages in Print: English Travel to America, 1576–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–16.

Week XIV: Gender and Race in the Discourse of Early Modern Travel

Reading

Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of the Canniballes’ (1580), trans. John Florio (1603).

Louis Montrose, ‘The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery’, Representations 33 (1991): 1–41.

Susan Basnett, ‘Travel Writing and Gender’, in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, eds. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 225–41.

[The extracts from traveler's accounts have been selected from Hadfield; from Kamps and Singh; and from the online resources indicated above.]

Focus Questions

1. How does English travel writing in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries participate in the formation of a colonial imaginary? What is the contribution of Elizabethan voyages to the idea of an English nation?

2. What are the principal motivations for English voyages in that period and how do they affect the travelers’ expectations? Can you identify utopian longings in those early English travel accounts? To what extent are the traveler's expectations fulfilled?

3. How do English travelers represent or misrepresent the Eastern Other? Do you see any differences from the representations of the Western Other, i.e., the native peoples of the Americas?

4. How do travel writers in that period manage to convey the sense of the marvelous, especially in cases of exotic travel, while maintaining credibility? Are there any recurring tropes or rhetorical strategies used in representations of foreign places?

5. Which are the factors that affect the self‐fashioning of English travelers? Do you see any instances of intercultural communication in these early travel accounts?

Seminar/Project Idea:

Fictional travels

Students will connect the travel accounts they have read over the course of the semester to a literary text, a play, a poem, or fiction. Each student will present the text s/he has chosen in class, drawing attention to themes and elements that suggest a relation between the particular literary work and accounts of the world outside England. The aim of the project is not a study of influences but a creative interaction between fiction and non‐fiction focusing on the representation of other cultures and peoples. Besides the well‐known plays that engage with the Other in Renaissance England, such as Tamburlaine, Anthony and Cleopatra, Othello, and the Tempest, many others like the various ‘Turk’ plays and travel plays, like The Travels of Three English Brothers (1607), The Sea Voyage (1622), etc., attest to the English public's interest in foreign places and peoples in that era.

Students will also write an research paper (3,500–4,000 words) on the same topic as their presentation.

For this project students are encouraged to consult Daniel Vitkus's critical edition of Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England: Selimus, Emperor of the Turks; A Christian Turned Turk; and The Renegado (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2000) as well as his study on the topic, entitled Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (Basingstoke/New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Other studies on the connection between travel writing and drama include: Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London's Theatre of the East 1576–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to the Tempest (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992); Claire Jowitt, Voyage, Drama and Gender Politics 1589–1649: Real and Imagined Worlds (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); Stephan Schmuck, ‘From Sermon to Play: Literary Representations of “Turks” in Renaissance England 1550–1625’, Literature Compass 2.1 (2005); Paul A. Cantor, ‘The Shores of Hybridity: Shakespeare and the Mediterranean’, Literature Compass 3.7 (2006): 896–913; and Matthew Dimmock, New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).