The literature of travel advice in England, 1560-1700

Abstract

Early modern English travel advice provides a rich resource for examining late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English society, particularly the complex of interrelated class anxieties regarding mobility itself, social as well as physical. Written mainly by and for the "gentle," travel guides in particular evoke aristocratic values and modes of behavior in their apologies for travel. While journeying is configured as a means to knowledge--a "real world" education in men and manners--the desire to travel itself is troped as the outer sign of an inner, spiritual nobility. Despite this tendency to present travel as ennobling, aristocratic apologies for travel recognize the efficacy of travel for gathering intelligence, a central component of early modern statecraft. In configuring the traveler as intelligencer, however, apologists for travel provide all citizens with a reason to travel. The courtier may consider himself an officer of the state, serving the commonwealth honorably by observing foreign affairs, but merchants, soldiers, and other travelers may also provide valuable intelligence for the state. Following the Interregnum, the gentlemen-scholars of the Royal Society of London utilized the intelligence-gathering possibilities of travel by deputizing merchants, naval officers, colonial speculators, and mariners of all classes as amateur scientific observers. The Society provided lists of queries for those traveling overseas, and these amateur natural philosophers returned observations from East and West Indies. The Society retained an aristocratic economy of travel, however, by situating the London virtuosi as final arbiters of truth claims and observations sent back to England. At the close of the seventeenth century, travel retains something of a "gentle" ethos, even as it opens new social possibilities to those who begin to build England's vast overseas empire.