Early Modern Travel: Encountering Other Environments

Prof. Natalya Din-Kariuki (University of Warwick)

This seminar will examine the expansion of travel, and the emergence of travel writing, in early modern Europe, particularly in England. It will be divided into two parts. In the first part, we will discuss the circumstances that contributed to the increasing prominence of travel writing as a genre, including developments in print culture, revolutions in geography (including the production of new maps and atlases), colonial ambition, the establishment of major trading companies, and the editorial efforts of figures such as Richard Hakluyt. We will also consider the rhetorical strategies English travellers used to understand and describe their experiences, their implications for our understanding of early modern conceptions of difference, of ideas of truth, proof, evidence, and credibility, and of definitions of ‘literature’ and ‘literariness’. In the second part, we will focus on two examples of English travel writing: first, Henry Blount’s Voyage into the Levant (1634), an account of travel to the Ottoman Empire by a traveller engaged with the discourses of natural philosophy and natural history, and second, Edward Terry’s Voyage to East-India (1655), an account of the author’s time as chaplain to Thomas Roe, the English ambassador at the Mughal court of Jahangir in 1616-19. We will look at the geographical, cultural, and political contexts of these texts, ask what motivated Blount and Terry to compose them, and think about the frameworks they offer for our study of the ‘global Renaissance’.

If you would like to obtain more information on this guest lecture or attend the talk, please contact Justin Begley.

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