History and Anthropology, 1996

Vol. 9, Nos. 2-3, pp. 139-190

Photocopying permitted by license only

1996 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association)

Amsterdam B.V. Published in The Netherlands
by Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH
Printed in Malaysia

INSTRUCTIONS FOR TRAVELLERS:

TEACHING THE EYE TO SEE
Joan-Pau Rubis
University of Reading

'Many countries it is good to see

preserving still our honestie'
(Heraclitus)

In 1681 Robert Hooke, the secretary of the Royal Society of London for
Improving Natural Knowledge, prefaced Robert Knox's Historical relation
of the island of Ceylon with a clear analysis of the scientific relevance of
travel literature. He began by recognising the distance that separated the
ancient and modern sciences 'of the parts of the world', the former
subjected to the restricted circulation of a number of fragile manuscripts,
the latter benefiting from both a multiplication of new accessions, and
their reproduction through the new art of printing. But he went on to
explain that more was needed to achieve the desirable preservation of all
discoveries. Accounts should be published, separately and in collections.
Travellers should be interviewed by men prepared to ask the right
questions and to help in the writing of proper histories. Above all, it was
necessary to promote 'instructions (to seamen and travellers) to shew
them what is pertinent and considerable to be observed in their voyages
and abodes, and how to make their observations and keep registers or
accounts of them'.
The strong idea expressed by Robert Hooke that his age had witnessed
a new kind of science formed the core of a new institutional rhetoric, but
was more than mere rhetoric: it also responded to the ongoing
transformation of the European system of knowledge. The traditional
education, based on rhetoric and confined by the boundaries of university
disciplines, had given way to a wide variety of empirical discourses
which supported new claims to scientific authority. It is not coincidental
that travel literature formed part of this new science. It was one of the
more obviously empirical discourses which had grown throughout the
sixteenth century, and(its wide-ranging (though often neglected) influence
requires that it should be studied as more than just peripheral to the
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intellectual history of the period. We can of course recall Montaigne on

the cannibals, or Giovanni Botero on the Chinese, but images of savagism
and civility and questions about relativism and hierarchy are only part of
the picture. The influence of travel literature was also felt, perhaps in a
more insidious way, through the idea of 'instructions for travellers'
stressed by Robert Hooke. The idea of teaching travellers what to observe
in an analytical way in fact addressed the concept of method, crucial to
the transition from rhetoric to science in the Renaissance. Methods were
not just techniques, ways of doing things, but also a specific and explicit
part of the educational and scientific project, one concerned with proper
rationality and its practical applications (in a characteristic definition
from a late sixteenth-century manual of logic, method was 'an art which
demonstrates how every discipline can be reduced to an art and fixed
procedure'). Methods for travellers were in fact a genre through which a
new intellectual elite sought to teach Europeans how to see the world.
The result of Robert Hooke's interview with Robert Knox, a sailor
working for the East India Company who had been a captive in Ceylon
for many years, was the publication of what a modern editor has defined
as a true, detailed, comprehensive description of the island, indeed 'a
scientific document'. Knox had been assisted in ordering his notes and
writing 'methodically' by his cousin John Strype, who was a minister, so
that when Hooke described the contents of the book he merely
summarised the existing headings, suggesting that more could have been
written about the subject. And yet the 'method' already implicit in the
discourse corresponded closely with a plausible list of instructions for
travellers: First came a physical and human geography of the island, with
notes on the economy, flora, fauna, and also a pathbreaking map of the
interior of the island. Then followed a description of the king, his
government and the history of his rule, including a rebellion. A third part
included a wide-ranging description of the people, again illustrated with
pictures, and including their 'humours and qualities', social groups,
religious beliefs and practices, everyday life, language, laws, and almost
every stage from birth to death. Knox concluded with an account of his
personal journey and its various circumstances. Despite the variety of
travel accounts, Knox's relation could be seen to represent a consensus
about the analytical categories that such a genre was supposed to cover.
Robert Hooke's project was conceived as public and institutional. The
Royal Society of which he was a member should act, as it had often done
in the past, to provide the crucial link between the numerous popular
travellers like Robert Knox and the common good of a controlled
scientific project. Robert Hooke's emphasis was less on assisting the
travellers themselves than on supporting the educated middlemen who
prepared instructions and published collections. He belonged to an

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141

institution which of course generated its own interests (and the Royal
Society also had links with the East India Company, to whose court of
directors Knox dedicated his relation). And yet, it was clear that Hooke's
proposals for collecting and publishing traveller's accounts with
methodical criteria followed well-known models that pre-dated the Royal
Society, as Hooke himself acknowledged when mentioning 'Mr Haclute
and Mr. Purchas'. In fact instructions for travellers did not originally
follow from the initiative of seventeenth-century scientific academies:
instead, the scientific institutions had become depositaries of a concern
for travel literature and for methodical travel which clearly belonged to
the cultural transformations of the late Renaissance.
The roots of this novelty can be found in the coming together of an
empirical tradition of travel writing (a spontaneous growth of practical
genres), and the educational concerns of humanists for whom traditional
logic and rhetoric needed to be adapted to new uses, both moral and
political, outside the boundaries of university learning. By looking back at
that process of coming together, a process in which travel within Europe
was as important as travel from Europe to the rest of the world, we can
identify the contexts in which the Renaissance took the decisive turn that
lay behind the idea of well-ordered, systematic, empirical accounts such
as Robert Knox's. We can further analyse at its origin the implications that
such carefully structured discourse on the diversity of lands and peoples
had for Europen self-reflection, colonial practices, and eventually the
human sciences of the Enlightenment.
By the end of the sixteenth century, a hundred years before Robert
Hooke wrote his preface to what would become a celebrated account of
Ceylon, travel books had already come to be seen as a distinctive genre
upon which some Europeans had begun to reflect openly. Not only were
accounts based upon empirical observations being used to re-define
ethnological generalizations, but we also find the elaboration of abstract
models for descriptive practices, and a sophisticated discourse on travel
as an activity and on the traveller as a human type. The evidence for this
comes from the appearance of a set of published texts (others remained in
manuscript) which offered to instruct the traveller in the process of
observation and classification, as well as on the moral and educational
implications of his activity. These texts included rhetorical orations such
as those by Thomas Wilson or Hermann Kirchner, published letters by
Philip Sidney or Justus Lipsius, essays by Montaigne and Bacon, political
treatises from Furio Ceriol to Henry Peacham, or the systematic analysis
by Jerome Turler, Theodor Zwinger, Hilarius Pyrkmair, Albert Meier,
Robert Dallington and Thomas Palmer. These treatises thus mark the
development of a meta-cultural discourse - a discourse on a discourse by which the older practice became methodised - and method was,

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indeed, a key concept of this period. The authors of these writings

directed their attention to the preparation of the attitudes of the subject
who was going to see, learn and profit in distant lands. They also offered
advice on how, for the purposes of description, reality could be structured
into several conceptual categories. They inherited a complex tradition of
rhetorical practices and logical 'common places', but in fact, the range of
genres and concerns that came to inspire them went far beyond the
conventional uses of rhetoric and dialectic. They included classical
geography, manuals for education, moral discourses, historical, even
fictional literature, and above all the more recent practice of cosmography
and travel writing, in its many forms. Altogether the 'methods for
travellers' were part of an eclectic cultural moment which often involved
a critical and creative attitude towards traditional sciences, in particular
Aristotelian sciences. They could be seen as part of a general process by
which, after a first constitutive phase in which travel literature was
conditioned by the relative novelty of the situation, and thus was
characterised by descriptive practices linked to specific purposes, the
genre became defined by a set of norms and conventions which were
subjected to preceptive thought.
The placing of these texts in their historical context raises a set of
questions. Do the treatises express something really new in the European
cultural tradition? Why do they appear at this particular time? Who
writes, and for whom? I shall here try to interpret the significance of the
appearance of this 'methodical' discourse by considering two aspects of
the problem: the material conditions underlying its emergence, in
particular the politics of economic expansion and social advancement
related to the activity of travel, and the concepts and attitudes revealed by
the text, tracing their sources to the cultural experience of sixteenthcentury Europe. The first aspect reveals a geographical progression
within Europe that, roughly speaking, takes us from the Mediterranean
countries, through northern Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, to
Elizabethan England (France would become more important in the
seventeenth century). The second aspect suggests that travel as a cultural
practice was a a very important channel in the transformation of
humanistic education, science and morality into some of their more
characteristic seventeenth-century forms.
Renaissance Methods, from Rhetoric to Science

Travelling was just one of the many activities and fields of knowledge
that were being 'methodized' in the late sixteenth and the early
seventeenth centuries. We may here recall, for the case of history, the

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Methodus ad facilem historiarutn cognitionem published by Jean Bodin in

1566, or the earlier Delia historia diece dialoghi by Francesco Patrizi (1560),
extracted by Thomas Blundeville as The true order and methode of writing
and reading historyes in 1574. The need for a discussion of the proper order
of argument, presentation and research in various arts and sciences was
related to the crisis of Aristotelianism within the context of the new
humanism. This, however, has to be understood as something quite
different from any wholesale rejection of Aristotle or university
education. Certainly at the beginning of the sixteenth century, classical
and Christian humanists imported from Italy an educational alternative
to scholastic philosophy which widened the models and sources of moral
and political discourse, introduced the polemical use of philological
criticism, and in some cases also involved an imaginative emphasis on
Neoplatonic syncretism to which both Aristotle and the Bible were
subjected. But at the same time Aristotle remained central to dialectics
and natural science, and some of the greatest critics of useless Aristotelian
logic (like Juan-Luis Vives) were also the defenders of what they saw as
Aristotle's genuine position, for instance his empirical and practiceoriented bias.
Crucially, the Aristotle of those who read Greek and collated
manuscripts with the skill of humanists like Poliziano, was no longer the
pillar of a natural-Christian system, but rather an invitation to further
thought against his own commentators. In particular, new attempts to
organise science (natural and moral) were bound to reflect upon the very
Aristotelian resources of topical dialectics and rhetoric - that is, upon the
creation of new arguments (through "discovery") and their effective
presentation (through "disposition"). Renaissance uses of Aristotelian
dialectics did not, of course, exclude uses of later Latin contributions to
rhetoric, such as Cicero's various works, the traditionally popular Ad
Herennium (whose concepts of inventio and dispositio were also the basis
for methodological reflections) or Quintilian's Institutio oratoria
(particularly appropriate as a model for humanist-educators concerned
with the public use of argument, and thus adopted by Lorenzo Valla,
Rudolph Agricola and, later, by the Jesuit colleges). Aristotle's conception
of dialectical arts as instrumental techniques, and his emphasis on
probable argument in the Topics, did in any case offer a flexible way to
move from the moral and political elements implicit in all rhetorical
exercises to the scientific idea of method as organisation and research thus the Topics were central to Agricola's work and indeed the
cornerstone of Renaissance dialectics. In this way logic was both the art
from which method was defined and an art (among others) that could be
presented methodically (this double aspect is one of the fundamental
ambiguities of Renaissance methodology). The crisis of Aristotelianism

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did not then consist in the mere fact that the authoritative philosopher
could be criticised (it was in the end the Revelation that wanted
protection) but also that in a new, wide-ranging cultural context, his
contribution could also be revised and adapted to new uses. The arts of
rhetoric and dialectic remained the basis of university education and
previous to any specialisation in, let us say, theology or law, not in order
to perpetuate outmoded scholastic philosophy, but rather the contrary:
they provided an access to new ways of thinking and to new disciplines
with empirical contents. They were as important to politics, morality and
law as mathematics was to physics and navigation. In fact, it is difficult to
imagine the contributions of sixteenth-century scientists without
reference to these basis disciplines in universities like Cambridge and
Padua, even though men like Bacon and Galileo may then have contested
the dogmatism of many teachers.
Therefore, rather than the cancellation of one discipline or
philosophical system by another, the Renaissance involved above all an
expansion of genres and options, often supported by different elites in
various centres. For example Bodin's 'history' was no longer a single
genre with a well-defined purpose - the glorification of Rome, or of the
French kings, or of the city of Florence - but instead involved a sense of
geographical and temporal discontinuity: there were different lands and
peoples, different climates, ancient and modern authors, and above all an
increasing pool of narrative resources in different languages available
through the printing press. For this reason, if one wanted to keep a
universal perspective in the midst of diversify and change (a concern
which was certainly important in Christian Europe) a method was
needed to fit the various particulars into a general scheme and evaluate
them. Moreover, this method drew on resources external to the discipline,
such as law (which in Bodin's case was at the same time historically and
theologically informed) or cosmography (which offered a model of
climatic determinism that could explain human diversity without
abandoning the concept of nature).1
It is thus possible to identify a general European movement of late
humanists concerned with putting in order the great amount of new and
old information made available through reporting, researching and
especially printing in the course of the century. While the medieval
encyclopedist copied, plagiarised and added different sources so as to
make his work as comprehensive as possible, in the late Renaissance there
was a growing awareness of the need not so much to add to the existing
body of data as to improve the systematicity of the treatment of the
different subject-matters into which it was divided. There was therefore a
concern, stimulated by the development of scepticism, to encourage clear
thought and to eliminate false and erroneous information (Bacon's 1605

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The advancement of learning was, for this reason, structured around

traditional 'errors' that one needed to percieve and correct, while his new
inductive logic also worked around 'idols' to be avoided).
This process implied the revision of the traditional categories of
classification provided by Aristotelian lists of topics, since they were felt
to be of little use. Thus the loci communes, in antiquity mnemonic a skill
used as a store of sayings, arguments and bits of knowledge of different
subjects, were developed by Renaissance educators like Agricola and
Erasmus. One of the most famous attempts to revise Aristotelian logic
was that of Peter Ramus in Paris. His new system, inspired by rhetorical
concerns, was devised to be more 'useful', but also 'natural' (this latter
emphasis on the 'natural' could of course support the typically Lullist
concern for an 'ars magna' which somehow reproduced the structure of
the universe). Information was collected through a limited number of
standard headings or loci (topoi m Greek), and the results classified from
the more abstract to the more concrete and particular. Since matter was
analysed and divided through basic dichotomies, the results could be
graphically displayed in 'trees', so that by the beginning of the
seventeenth century a treatise could be recognised as 'methodical'
through this kind of display. The trees were often printed, and
simultaneously summarised and analysed the argument (in fact 'books on
method' were also methodically displayed).
Although in reality less practical than it claimed to be ('a tendentious
levelling' of all sources of Greek methodology 'to one common
denominator', according to Gilbert), Ramus's system contributed to a
criticism of authority by provoking a controversy around the validity of
pure Aristotelianism. More indirectly, the widespread and graphic use of
the loci communes and disputes about how they should be organised
entailed a reflection on the linguistic categories of thought. Needless to
say, informed criticism of ancient authorities and reflection on analytical
methods were both central to the development of a new attitude towards
knowledge and natural science. (For instance, the controversy Ramus
raised in Cambridge was also in the background of Bacon's proposals).
Above all, Renaissance methods actually worked by addressing
reading habits and connecting these to other uses. A method was an
analysis of a discourse (an oration, a relation or an essay) on any given
subject, such as travel or history; it was also, by extension, an anlysis of
the activity such as travelling or writing and reading histories, and a
learning device concerning what travellers or historians should look for
and write down for future reference. Method was analytical order for the
purpose of researching and teaching a moral and practical truth.
Blundeville's True order and method of wry ting and reading hystories provides

a good illustration. He framed the aims of his 'method' in moral terms

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and emphasized the search for wisdom, in particular political wisdom.

Therefore, when reading histories one was expected to collect examples
and write them down under diverse headings 'in such order as we may
easily finde them when soever we shall have neede to use them'. The
headings for such examples should not be (as was often the case in the
tables of books) 'the names of persons from whence they are taken', but
rather 'according to the matters and purposes whereto they serve'. He
went on to reject 'common places' of virtues and vices, or things
commendable and not commendable, as far too simple, and instead
suggested 'other places also besydes them, meete to be applyed to every
one of those partes of observation which we seeke' (that is, the important
headings were not Caesar or Nero, nor even military skill or cowardice,
but rather kinds of political situation in which both wisdom and error
might be displayed). The reader should in fact create new places as he
went on reading and observing every day. This exercise, it was understood, created a store of examples which greatly assisted human memory
and would be useful for morality and politics - for oneself or for the
service of the commonwealth.
Blundeville's treatise was partly based on Francesco Patrizi's typically
humanist dialogues, but he also translated a treatise by his friend
Accontio Tridentino (Aconzio), and Italian Protestant whose precepts
analysing historical discourse were inspired by the new dialectics of a
revised Aristotle. A better known treaties by Aconzio, De methodo (Basel,
1558), was also used by Blundeville in his Arte oflogike (1599) to present a
method more complete than Ramus's. Blundeville considered Aconzio's
logical method superior because it did not limit itself to an analysis from
the general to the particular, but also considered the possibility of going
back from the particular to the general in order to avoid losing sight of
'hidden' possibilities. Aconzio's two treatises, taken as a whole, illustrate
how typically humanistic concerns such as the reading of histories for the
sake of political wisdom were directly influenced by the concern with an
abstract method for the arts and sciences that would cover both discovery
and practical use.
Beyond the obvious frame of rhetorical disciplines like history, loci
communes were also used as a way of organising new encyclopedias, in a
long-term departure which according to Walter Ong reflected the
transition from the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages (which had
insisted on the selective preservation of knowledge) to one dominated by
the printing press. This use of the loci in many ways promoted a 'textual
induction' which thus preceded the empirical induction of Bacon and his
followers. In this sense the common opposition of humanist 'looking at
texts' to scientific 'looking at things' is too simplistic: the key
development should be conceived as the extension of humanistic ways of
analysing texts to all kinds of empirical observation. Peter Ramus'

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particular contribution was therefore part of a long-term transformation

which pre-dated him and was above all characterised by the expansion of
scientific discourses, that is, the addition of new genres and observations
to the classical corpus. This pervasive concern with putting together new
and old in a universal system can be seen in the case of one of Ramus'
admirers, Theodor Zwinger, who devised one of the earlier methods for
travellers as a set of rules and a list of topics to be observed. This
Methodus Apodemica (Basel, 1576) was itself conceived as an aid to an
ambitious encyclopedic project, the Theatrum umanae vitae, which went
through five editions between 1565 and 1604, each more comprehensive
than the former - certainly dwarfing Bodin's Universae naturae theatrum of
1596, a work of a similar kind.' 8 But Zwinger's encyclopedia of loci
communes also acknowledged as a precedent the 1504 Commentariorum
urbanorum of Raffaello Volterrano, an early Italian cosmographer who
was himself the inheritor of Pius II, humanist-pope and traveller. With
Pius II (1405-64) we reach a kind of humanist starting-point: in his
cosmography he used the newly-discovered Strabo to complete Ptolemy,
added observations from recent travellers in India, and conceived the
whole as a kind of geographically-informed history, a model which Bodin
would sustain a century later in his Methodus. It was also as natural
histories, though conceived as better informed than Pliny's, that the most
scientific accounts of the New World were published in sixteenth-century
Spain, from Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo's Historia general y natural de
las Indias (1535) to Jose de Acosta's Historia natural y moral de las Indias
(1590).

Travel Writing and Travel Collecting

The practice of travel writing, certainly one of the conspicuous
developments of the culture of the Renaissance, generated a fundamental
set of genres which contributed powerfully to the multiplication of
observations of various kinds (covering both human and natural
sunjects). This practice was not only a pre-conditon for the cumulation of
a 'pool' of novel empirical data, it also created awareness about the
process of describing the world, because, unlike ancient authors, the
travellers could be questioned by educated men, who often wrote their
own travel journals. (Montaigne's journal is difficult to conceive a
hundred years earlier not because of the way he observes, but rather
because in the fifteenth century a self-respecting nobleman, as opposed to
a merchant, would not have normally written about such everyday
matters - the genre had not yet been invented. Thus when in the fifteenth
century Pius II wrote his recollections, he used, after Julius Caesar, the
form of commentaria).

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Despite various medieval precedents, a change both quantitative and

qualitative in the practice of travel-writing becomes apparent between the
late fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries. J.R. Hale has indeed
identified a whole range of literary conventions 'whose fusion formed a
process dubbed by Jacob Burkhardt "the discovery of the world" but is
better, because less subjectively, called the discovery of how to describe
the world'. Questioning the direct influence of medieval travelogues
such as Marco Polo's, Hale acknowledges several traditions which offered
models for individuals recording their travel experience: barely literary
activities such as late-medieval compilations of lists, geographical
itineraries and household accounts, but also more sophisticated
conventions such as the recording of prestigious events, the chronicles of
princely sojourns with their various subjects, biographical eulogies of
"great men", and civic eulogies of proud cities. To these one should add
the long-standing but by no means static literature of pilgrimage (thus
fourteenth-century pilgrims like the Florentine Lionardo Frescobaldi and
his companions Simone Sigoli and Giorgio Gucci recorded many
observations in 1384 about particular customs and situations which a
twelfth-century predecessor would have neglected to include in a
religious narrative, and by 1524 Francesco Suriano could publish an
account of pilgrimage in the form of a dialogue in which naturalhistorical information occupied a full second part.) Thus different
traditions of travel-writing, each of them tied to original purposes but
also to specific identities, combined in the more elaborate cosmographical
genres, and provided the basis for autobiographical recollections and for
the more professionalised political reports of ambassadors.
There was however an important step between being stimulated and
influenced by such conventions and reflecting consciously about them in
a general way. One important development in this direction must be
related to the appearance of the individual traveller as a writer of books
self-consciously addressing a reading public. This happened in Italy even
before the consolidation of the printing press and the success of the
Iberian discoveries, which therefore merely multiplied the effects of a
previous development. Thus, by 1487 the Venetian patrician (merchant
and ambassador) Iosafa Barbaro presented his account of Persia as part of
a novel development in which the Venetian merchants not only opened
up a world of human diversity hitherto unknown, but also confronted
new problems of credibility. His dedson to write was presented as the
awakening of a consciousness that there existed a genre of travel writing
in which ancient authors like Pliny or Strabo were followed by modern
ones like Marco Polo and Nicolo Conti, and even strict contemporaries
like Alvisa da Mosto. This rhetoric centered on the idea of a new source
of knowledge would become ever more important in the following years,

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and by 1510 Ludovico di Varthema, when writing a preface to the first

Italian edition of his travels to the east, was able to oppose the concrete
knowledge derived from his own experience as traveller to the often vain
cosmological speculations of university scholars. His book, full of firsthand observations from Arabia to India, but also evidence of a degree of
opportunism and self-promotion, can be treated as paradigmatic of the
new genre.
How the travellers legitimized themselves by insisting on their role as
empirical observers was only part of the debate. The theme of travel had
a substantial literary history that went from chivalric and religious
literature, through humanist appropriations of the figure of Ulysses, to
discussions of the qualities of the Renaissance counsellor. From the
fifteenth century it can be argued that this theme articulated a lay image
of wisdom and virtue related to empirical settings - not only in the
writings of humanists like Giovanni Pontano, Francesco Sansovino and
Fadrique Furio Ceriol, but also in more obviously feudal pieces such as
the Catalan chivalric novels Curial e Giilfa and Tirant lo Blanc. The traveller
of the Renaissance offered, therefore, not only a new source of true
knowledge, but also a new model of virtue.
However, all this rhetoric, justified or not, was still far from a
methodical training of minds. This would only come from the interaction
between educational projects and practical needs. The Venetian case
illustrates this, because the commercial learnings of its patriciate
determine not only the civic and unadventurous slant of its humanism,
but also and early engagement with oriental societies which provided a
unique continuity from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. The
issue is not so much what Marco Polo's contribution had been in the
fourteenth century, since his account was more often read in French than
in Venetian (it was certainly composed in some sort of French), but rather
that from the second half of the fifteenth century other Venetians
increasingly looked back to him as a predecessor in an enterprise that was
at the same time scientific, political and patriotic. Thus the patrician of the
late fifteenth century conscious of his role as a travel writer (such as
Iosafa Barbaro) was succeeded in the following century by the collector
and publisher of accounts of new discoveries, from the remarkable
volume published by Fracanzio of Montalboddo as early as 1507 to the
much vaster project of Giovanni Battista Ramusio, edited in the 1530s but
only published in the 1550s. Meanwhile, many of those Venetian
patricians educated by Pomponazzi in Padua were also engaged in a
highly regulated activity as writers of political reports (although, of
course, they were not the only ambassadors to write them).
The obligation to write 'relations' of their embassies, confirmed by the
senate in 1524, was accompanied by guidelines on what to observe which

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certainly constituted a basic 'method' for travellers. The four main topics
selected for the description of a state were its name and position, its
climatic temperament, the character and customs of its people, and the
particulars concerning its prince. Each of these headings included various
special sub-topics. Throughout the following century, the expanding
genre of political cosmographies would often be organised according to
similar topics, although not in an overly rigid manner. The same can be
said about the lists of things to be observed in the 'methods' for travellers.
Thus what could be described as a local tradition appropriate to the
peculiar conditions of Venice soon became influential in a wider and more
ambitious European context. The genre of 'instructions for travellers' was
chiefly initiated by a group of German humanists who, like Theodor
Zwinger, studied law or medicine at the university of Padua and were to
a degree inspired by Ramism. Although we must beware exaggerating a
link which was by no means exclusive, these scholars seem to have found
contacts and inspiration in Venice, centre of a humanism particularly
concerned with civic and mercantile problems, and Padua, the nearby
university whose doctors and lawyers were influenced by the revisionist
form of Aristotelianism associated with Pietro Pomponazzi at the
beginning of the century and Jacopo Zabarella in the second half. They
then taught and published in different towns of northern Europe, mostly
in Germany.
In the following two centuries the tradition of writing methods for
travelling persisted especially in the contentious and divided Empire, but
the movement also had links with the Netherlands and eventually took
root in England. The tradition was therfore more prominent in the
recently reformed countries whose intelletual elites, usually engaged in
the education of the aristocracy, were trying to maintain contact with the
inheritance of the Italian Renaissance and the world of geographical
discoveries, which mainly lay on the Catholic side of the confessional
divide. The authors of the first treatises on travel, men such as Turler,
Zwinger or Pryckmair, often knew each other and were associated with
centres of publishing such as Basel. Some of them, like so many
Renaissance scholars interested in an overall philosophical synthesis
which would stand above cultural and religious divisions, also showed
interest in the Neoplatonist and Cabbalistic traditions where mysticism
and scientific knowledge met in a comprehensive world-picture.
The discussion of a method implied two different moves, the
imposition of a principle of order on the information and the preference
for a particular sort of order. However, as revealed by the study of travel
accounts written before any such humanist method was devised, cultural
discourses had a structuring effect a long time before they became the
object of a conscious cultural debate. The emergences of a specific

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method for travel and for the description of foreign lands and peoples
seems to have been the result of a cumulative process, by which both the
information and its political importance increased. This process must be
related to the fragmentation of political and cultural spaces brought about
by the Reformation. While the humanists had made available new
classical sources and thus provided the basis for a sophisticated lay
science and morality, the crisis of this religious consensus (which affected
political legitimacy within and outside each state) demanded that such
science be put to immediate use, both within Europe and in the new
colonial contexts. The solution given to the need created by this process
followed a pattern which was to characterise the epistemological
radicality of cultural discourses in modern Europe: the proper way to
acquire knowledge wa no longer the spontaneous acceptance of
traditional forms, but the widening of the practices and the self-conscious
reflection applied to them, with the ideal of finding an abstract and
universal technique that could be learnt and used by an autonomous and
capable subject. Thus the educational practices of the humanists did more
than offer new moral discourses: by insisting on the definition and
revision of linguistic practices, they stimulated critical attitudes in a
world where the multiplicity of cultural resources and of institutional
combinations had already had a devastating effect on traditional sources
of scientific authority. The insistence on the credibility and authority of
the traveller as direct witness which characterises the genre especially in
the sixteenth century expresses the way in which the new discourse
sought its own legitimacy. The crisis of authority affected above all the
Church and the University, but also many rulers who could not prevent a
challenging writer from travelling elsewhere or at least publishing
abroad. Paradoxically, the political and cultural fragmentation of Europe
was accompanied by new forms of communication and dependance
which ensured that the common language, threatend by religious
and national divisions, could be re-created.
Travel literature contributed powerfully to the development of this
renewed common discourse. Although some travel books had been very
popular since the late Middle Ages - especially those of Marco Polo and
Mandeville - the real expansion of the genre must be clearly related to the
great European discoveries overseas between the end of the fifteenth and
the beginning of the sixteenth centuries. It is however only later in the
sixteenth century that the great published collections appear, as a result of
both the cumulation of sources and the growing interest in keeping all the
new information organised, so that it could be used effectively by
humanists, merchants and politicians. Some of these collections often
remained in manuscripts, for instance those by Piero Vaglienti, a
Florentine merchant, or by the Libson-based Moravian printer Valentim

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Fernandes, who kept prospective German investors from Nuremberg and

other cities well informed of the new voyages to the East. But we also find
successful editions of particular narratives from a very early stage, either
the medieval accounts of the East by Marco Polo and Nicolo Conti
(printed in Latin in the late fifteenth century, and then translated and
published together in Lisbon by the same Valentim Fernandes in 1502) or
the latest news about the new world, such as the letter describing
Columbus' second voyage published in Italy by Scyllacius (c.1497) and
the Mundus Novus attributed to Vespucci and printed all over Europe
(c.1503). Both these texts were heavily edited Latin summaries of original
reports written in vernacular languages, expressing the early interaction
of the practical concerns of merchants and other investors with the more
rhetorical ones of the humanists.
Similar, but more important, were some attempts to publish in a single
volume several texts of related interest which may or may not have
appeared before in print, such as the Paesi novamente retrovati, et novo
mondo da Alberico Vesputio Florentino intitulato (Vicenza, 1507), or the Novus
orbis regionum ac insularum veteribus incognitarum (Basel, 1532). These two

collections were prefaced by humanist scholars, but must have been

based on the initiative of merchant-patricians and printers, and therefore
express the existence of a continuity between the manuscript collections
of the practical men, the economic interests of printers, and the
intellectual curiosity of humanists. The Paesi, often reprinted and
translated, became a profitable editional enterprise devised to entertain as
well as inform the reader, from an awareness of the contrast between the
newly discovered marvels and Pliny's lists of natural facts. The collection
assembled chronologically various materials and quite often the best
available, ranging from narratives of the first Portuguese and Spanish
voyages to letters written by Venetian merchant-spies trying to smuggle
information on the prospects of Indian trade of Lisbon. The Novus orbis
followed a similar pattern and was based on the same sort of material,
though amplified with new additons which, by combining old and new,
land and sea, and West and East, showed a tendency towards a universal
view of the world (that is, a cosmography) based on travel literature. The
fabulous is still a very significant ingredient in some of the travel
narratives of these collections. It is obvious that, despite some pious
introductory remarks produced by a Protestant humanist (as in the case
of Simon Grynaeus for the Novus orbis), the printer's opportunity to make
some profit out of general curiosity was more urgent than the concern
with distinguishing "truth" from "falsehood" or the adoption of a critical
and reflective attitude towards the reports. There were several
expressions of scepticism and debate, but in general, criticism and
method would only slowly come to clarify the status of the new genre.

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This is true even when, as in the case of the Novus orbis, the edition was
expensive and written in Latin, which implies that the intended readers
were the wealthy and the better educated.
Other collections, such as Antonio and Paolo Manuzio's Viaggi fatti da
Vinetia alia Tana, in Persia, in India, et in Constantinopoli... (Venice 1543, and

then reprinted in 1545), were organised with a more local and specific
purpose. Here all accounts deal with Venetian travels to the East, having a
double purpose: to provide information about the Portuguese tradesystem in the Indian Ocean, and to encourage the Venetians to pursue
their business over there regardless of the apparent strength of the Iberian
competitiors, exploiting the traditional routes overland. It is interesting
that, while the Florentines had been more active than the Venetians in
Lisbon, and in fact had the advantage of an arrangement with the
Portuguse crown to finance and participate in the oriental fleets from the
earliest voyages, many of their letters never found way into print
(materials found for instance in the collection of Piero Vaglienti and, later,
that of Alessandro Zorzi). This suggests that what gave rise to a public
genre was not the mere presence of humanist circles, nor of merchants
active in the East, but rather the way these two elements interacted as
each centre developed a particular cultural strategy in accordance with
the political ethos of its elite. Venice, effectively excluded from the
Atlantic and far behind the Florentines in Lisbon and the Genoese in
Sevile, was not so much a centre of production of new narratives as a
centre of preservation, mediation and publication, characterised by a
solid vocation to maintain both its commercial interests and political
constitution despite changes abroad. In a special way the Viaggi were a
model for future collections, especially that of Richard Hakluyt in
English, because they contributed to the creation of a body of quasimythological discourse inspired by a nationalistic identity, and because
they did so with purpose of both providing practical information and a
political message to a community that may profit from the exploitation of
trade routes.
The genre of travel literature became more central to European culture
through its continuous expansion, and between the middle and the end of
the sixteenth century important collections which combined a systematic
compilation of sources with a critical attitude towards their contents were
published, first in Italy and later in northern Europe. This process was
obviously related to the fact that the activity of travelling had become a
much more common phenomenon. It was not however the mere
accumulation of travels that explains the higher degree of elaboration of
the cultural discourses associated with them, but also the more distinctive
role they played in social and political terms.

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Thre are two different historical developments that contributed to the

appearance of treatises on travel such as those by Jerome Turler, Albert
Meier or Thomas Plamer. The first and most influential was the growing
importance travel within Europe as an aristocratic activity associated
with the education of the young. This development took place according
to humanistic ideals of human perfection and to the growing political role
played by noblemen as ambassadors and informers of princes and
republics. The treatises appeared therefore at the same time that the
practice of recording travels abroad became generalised, despite
significant differences from country to country. They were however not
simply lists of topics designed to guide the writing of travel journals, but
more generally, a philosophy of travel in which ethical ideals were
expressed.
The second stimulus came from the evolution of the European
expansion overseas. Here it must be stressed that the connection between
travel outside Europe and within is not always obvious. The status of a
description of Turkey, a letter from America, or the journal of a year in
Italy, were not identical, and this affected not only the way each text was
conceived, but also the way it circulated, whether it was published, and
how it was received. Nevertheless, it is not entirely coincidental that the
same Venetians who published descriptions of Persia or Turkey also sent
ambassadors with instructions to write a 'relation' describing Spain or
France. More generally, the awareness of diversity within Europe cannot
be separated from the new historical perspectives created by accounts of
cannibals in Brazil or the Spanish conquest of Mexico, as Montaigne
exemplifies. Similarly, Robert Hooke's instructions for travellers overseas
of 1681 had a European counterpart in Richard Lassels' preface
'conerning travel', which introduced his successful guide of the Grand
Tour, the Voyage of Italy published posthumously in 1670.
While the discovery of new lands and peoples and the creation of
European enclaves in Africa, Asia and America generated a new and
varied literature, its cultural significance changed with the evolution of
the colonial systems. For Portugal and Castile, peripheral countries in
the international culture of the late Middle Ages, the overseas conquests
coincided with the selective reception of Italian humanism and were
powerful stimuli for the development of vernacular genres. However,
after a few decades of a relatively successful monopolistic regime, the
Iberian colonial systems began to suffer from the growing competition of
other European powers, and found it increasingly difficult to preserve
their ambitious imperial structures as a coherent and profitable business
for the metropolis. From the very beginning Florentine bankers financed
the Portuguese expeditions, while private adventurers determined the
course of the Spanish conquest. However, the monarchy managed in both

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cases to maintain itself as the key institution that centralised, gave

direction and legitimised the collective enterprise. This position was
increasingly eroded. To the extent that there was a world-economy based
on trade, its beneficiaries were less the Portuguese or the Castilian
economies than those of the Genoese, the Flemish and later the Dutch or
the English. For the second half of the sixteenth century the Spanish
armies tried with precarious success to defend the Habsburg inheritance
against various enemies: the Dutch rebels in Flanders, the French in Italy,
the Turks in the Mediterranean, and the English in the Altantic. It was not
only that there were capable competitors posing a threat, but also and
more significantly that the colonial systems had had regressive social and
economic effects in the Iberian peninsula, while the superficial unity
imposed by the crown on a set of heterogeneous and increasingly
divergent territories failed to provide the political system with any
coherence.This became evident when in 1580 Philip II of Castile united
the crowns of Spain and Portugal, but was unable to coordinate their two
colonial empiries in a single system under his control. In the same way as
the American silver passed through Castile without making any
permanant contribution to the country's economy other than inflation,
oriental spices went through Lisbon towards northern Europe without
altering the pattern of dependance of a poor economy, nor consolidating
the position of a reduced merchant class still too vulnerable to the
accusation of crypto-Judaism.
Thus the critical point was reached (roughly at the turn of the new
century) when these crown-controlled but still essentially feudal models
of overseas expansion were successfully challenged by the new chartered
trading companies of the United Provinces, England and, to a lesser
extent, France and other countries. Of course the plundering activities
and missionary ideals did not disappear completely in the new ventures,
but these powers developed other economic and political formulae as
well, in response to better financial resources and a different sociocultural background, which fostered and alternative to traditional
aristocratic values. Even before the Dutch and the English were able to
send regular fleets to the Indies, the growing competition for the colonial
trade and its expansion were evident motivations for the development of
a more intense, widespread and critical interest towards travel literature,
a change assisted by the transformations that were occurring in European
culture after the impact of humanism and the Reformation.
To begin with information, and reliable information, became vital.
While there developed a common ground of techniques for collecting and
classifying data, the way this information was managed depended of the
political structure of each colonial venture. It is significant that the official
questionnaires prepared by the servants of Philip II of Castile throughout

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the 1570s in order to collect organized information about the Indies and
his other possessions parallel the Ramist systems of loci communes of the
instructions for travellers. And yet the resulting geographical relations,
or the royal cosmography devised by Juan Lopez de Velasco as part of the
same ambitious system of administrative science, were conceived as
restricted information and did not configure (by entering the world of
books, universities and academies) a public sphere of science for the
commonwealth. This restriction was in accordance not only with Philip
II's authoritarianism, but also with his defensive understanding of his
role as a Catholic prince, which led him also to sponsor indexes of
forbidden books and to prevent his subjects from travelling and studying
abroad. In this way the pattern of imperial administration overseas
mirrored the pattern of imperial containment in Europe, with equally
disastrous long-term results. The manuscripts that constituted the most
ambitious colonial geography to that date (like the best botanical and
ethnological treatises written by humanist doctors and missionaries)
remained buried in Castilian royal archives, only to be partially recovered
by the historian Antonio de Herrera early in the seventeenth century in an
effort to renew the rhetoric of empire. This, paradoxically, ensured that
the Dutch could translate this material for their own purposes almost
immediately thereafter. Precisely because the non-Iberian countries were
initially net importers of information about the discoveries, during the
sixteenth century they were more eager to translate and publicise, first in
Italy and then, notably during the second half of the century, in northern
Europe.
This competitive context also meant that the ideological importance of
exploration and discovery as a form of national epic increased, from the
Castilian and Portuguese chronicles and poems to Richard Hakluyt's
Principall navigations. It was still in the context of Iberian colonial
hegemony that in 1550 the Venetian civil servant and humanist Giovanni
Battista Ramusio published the first volume of his Delle navigationi et
viaggi, a serious attempt to compile, organise and provide a critical
edition of all the important travel accounts then available. Ramusio
participated in the development of a new geographical science based on
systematically updating the best classical sources through comparison
with recent reports. He was, however, also concerned with studying the
possibilities of the spice routes in the East, and with bringing to light the
more valuable descriptions written by the early Portuguese in Asia
(especially those by Tome Pires and Duarte Barbosa), which had often
been kept out of circulation by the Portuguese crown.
The fact that for Ramusio a critical attitude towards texts written in the
past was so clearly associated with a sense of collective business marked
a shift within the humanist tradition, and helps explain his use of the

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vernacular too. This business dimension was of course missing from the
work of prominent fifteenth-century humanists like Lorenzo Valla and
Marsilio Ficino, more oriented towards theological questions, but also
went beyond the patriotic historiography of Florentine chancellors like
Leonardo Bruni or Poggio Bracciolini, whose approach to history was
pragmatic only insofar as it was rhetorical and educational. Similarly the
Latin cosmography of Pius II, based on the new availability of Ptolemy
and Strabo, was still conceived as an aid to the crusade against the Turks
and was pragmatic within that framework. And it was mainly curiousity
for human moral diversity and the power Fortune that led Poggio
Bracciolini to interrogate Nicolo Conti in 1441, a century before Ramusio
tried to extract reliable information from the resulting account, or from
that of Marco Polo.
Much of Ramusio's shift can be explained by the Venetian context. The
city was, as we have seen, the centre where the revival of a medievel
tradition of trade worth the Orient could be combined with the scientific
interests of several Italian humanists, concerned with the increased
availability of classical literature but also aware of the novelty, and
sometimes superiority, or their own age. The fact that humanists in Venice
consistently developed a very pragmatic approach to the revival of the
classics was probably related to the fact that the Republic was under the
control of merchants and land-owners who had recently consolidated
their aristocratic system of government. Thus Ramusio's humanism
combined a sense of duty towards the Republic he was serving (as a highranking secretary, ambassador and librarian) with a personal interest in
the classical sources of science. This interest included both editing classics
and learning about philosophy, cosmography and astronomy, and was
shared weith other personal friends, both in Venice itself (Pietro Bembo,
Girolamo Fracastoro, Antonio Manuzio, Jacopo Gastaldi and others) and
in Europe or America (Andrea Navagero sent him materials from Spain,
Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo from Santo Domingo). Among this elite
Ramusio, with linguistic skills that embraded not only Latin and Greek,
but also various vulgar languages, played a key role as a specialist in
matters concerning the new discoveries. Above all his work expressed a
unified vision of the world in a coherent and updated geographical
representation, combining the interests of the scientist (through the
description of natural phenomena), the political merchant (by proposing
the organization of the spice-trade in a world perpective) and the
practical traveller (by providing all sorts of factual information).
Gastaldi's three maps of Africa, Asia and America, which accompanied
the Navigation! et viaggi, made good use of the volumes' textual
information to graphically present the new vision.

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Of course Ramusion was part of an erudite minority. Only a few among

his comtemporaries compared different sources and reflected upon them.
Many more merely knew what they found in popular editions of exiciting
travel accounts, and being moved both by curiosity and desire of evasion,
easily accepted old cliches and mixed fact and fiction. And there was an
even greater number of Europeans who could not read and simply had
some very vague ideas about the Indies, rich and monstrous in the
sixteenth century as in the Middle Ages. The apochryphal John
Mandeville was no less successful then as he had been a century earlier.
But this does not detract from the importance of a collection that would
be crucial for the development of late Renaissance cosmographies.
Ramusio was extending to the whole of Europe what his friend Antonio
Manuzio had done for Venice. Thus the three volumes of the Navigationi
el viaggi, published posthumously and soon afterwards translated into
French, became the starting point for all those who wanted reliable and
complete information about the discoveries, and remained authoritative
for the more critical minds during the second half of the century (its poor
reception in Spain and Portugal was of course conditioned by royal and
ecclesiastical control of cosmographical science). The collection was
fundamental to future cosmographers like Frangios Belleforest and
Giovanni Botero, and could serve as a model to later compilers and
editors like Francesco Sansovino, Richard Hakluyt and Theodor De Bry.
There is also evidence that individual travellers with some education such as the Florentine merchant-humanist Filippo Sassetti - tried to
recognize abroad what they had read in Ramusio's volumes, just as
Columbus had relied on Marco Polo or Pius II when he found his Indies.
Methodical Travel and Methodical Science in the English
Renaissance
The transmission of the new genres from Italy to Germany and England
was not always direct. Flanders was an important intermediate space
between the products of the Iberian expansion and the rest of Europe, and
this affected not only silver and spices, but also chronicles of conquest,
humanist circles and cosmographical science. This mediating role seems
to have been particularly important up until the 1550s, when Philip II
brought in a change of policy (Castilian-centred and religiously
intolerant) that effectively severed many links and eventually led to the
revolt. Similarly, France was an important stage in the selective reception
of the Italian Renaissance, and it was in Paris, between 1583 and 1588,
that Richard Hakluyt read all those materials that he had not found
previously in Oxford, and which made the first edition of his Principall
navigations, voiages and discoveries of the English nation possible.

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These mediations involved important changes. Thus, the systematic

interest in scientific geography and other natural phenomena that we find
in Ramusio was to a great extent abandoned in the English collections
a s s e m b l e d ^ Eden (1553, 1555 and 1577) and Hakluyt (1589 and
1598-1600). In both cases the explicit purpose of the editor's effort was
to promote an English expansion by providing the primary sources that
conveyed information on routes, lands and peoples. The sciences of
geography and navigation were obviously central to their interests, and
Hakluyt in particular cultivated contacts with Gerardus Mercator and
Andre Thevet, but their travel collections were more focused. Eden acted
mainly as a translator, and would rely heavily on the first edition of
Miinster's Cosmographia (1544) and on the literature of the Castilian
expansion (but not yet on Ramusio's collection), while Hakluyt's main
originality consisted in encouraging nationalist feelings by concentrating
on Englishmen as central figures in navigations and discoveries. Thus,
even though Hakluyt's work was often inspired by Ramusio's example,
he abandoned the Venetian's universalist emphasis. His appeal to
national pride obviously had a strong manipulative power, which could
be used to lead people from fear of the Spanish threat to excitement with
Drake's practical achievements. The information provided by the reports
was intended to dispel incredulity, to stir interest and to stimulate action.
As a consequence the collections had the virtue of having a certain
fidelity to the original documents, following humanist principles of
philological criticism and those methods of compilation developed first
by lawyers and historians.
In both cases the compilations should be set in the context of the
activities of certain circles of merchants and courtiers who were interested
in the material benefits of overseas expansion. Eden, a real pioneer in the
English context, had connections with the Muscovy Company, launched
in 1553 with the technical assistance of Sebastan Cabot from the House of
Trade {Casa de Contratacion) at Seville. His activities were largely
derivative and thus represent an English reflection of Spanish success.
Hakluyt's career (c.1552-1616) belongs to a later stage in which English
initiative was stronger, more original, and clearly directed against the
now unified overseas possessions of Philip II, and is surely even more
symptomatic. His background combined Oxford University training with
mercantile contatcs. This placed him in a unique position as a specialised
geographer. A first compilation of travels concerning America in 1582
secured him the patronage of Howard Effingham, then Lord Admiral and
also brother-in-law of Edward Stafford, the ambassador with whom,
serving as chaplain, Hakluyt departed for Paris. The secretary of state
Francis Walsingham was instrumental in seeing that Hakluyt was
encouraged to participate in projects of trade and plantation along the

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north American routes, for his own private god and the 'publike benefit
of this Realme'. The favour of the Queen, conductive to stable
prebendial benefits, was secured with the 'Discourse concerning western
discoveries' of 1584, an ideological and strategic blueprint for English
imperialism in the Atlantic. And after the publication of the three
expanded volumes of his Principall Navigations in 1598-1600 he obtained
further appointments at Westminster, became advisor of the East India
company and a chief promoter of the Virginian adventures. This kind of
effective interaction between private initiative and state support was in
the long term essential.
The dedicatory letters and the prefaces to the readers of both editions of
Richard Hakluyt's Principall Navigations are very revealing of his explicit
intentions. So, in his dedication to Sir Francis Walsingham of 1589
Hakluyt links his interest and curiosity for voyages and discoveries to an
experience he had as a youth, when his cousin Richard Hakluyt, a
gentleman of the Middle Temple, showed him certain books and maps
that gave him the first systematic ideas about the division of the earth in
different parts. Hakluyt mentions immediately several geographical and
political concepts (seas, gulfs and rivers, but also empires, kingdoms etc.),
as well as 'their special commodities, and particular wants, which by the
benefit of traffike and entercourse merchants are plentifully supplied'.
This obvious interest in economic activities is expressed by defending
specific projects, involving the search for alternative routes to the East
Indies, the establishment of trading communities there, and the
colonisation of Virginia in America. He acknowledges that the divison of
the earth in different parts has been improved in his times, thus joining
the chorus of all those who saw in the discoveries an undeniable progress
of knowledge, and is aware that there is still a lot to be explored. He also
finds a religious sanction for the interest in cosmographical knowledge,
and quotes a psalm according to which 'they which go downe to the sea
in ships, and occupy by the great waters, they see the works of the Lord,
and his woonders in the deepe...' (Psalm 107,23-24).
However, the final and decisive stimulus to Hakluyt's commitment to
collecting travel literature comes form a nationalistic feeling explicity
stirred by the comparison with other Europeans: having heard about the
success of other nations, and unable to reply on behalf of England with
the current knowledge, he decides to investigate and to compile
documentation so as to demonstrate that the English too have done well
overseas (and for this reason should feel encouraged to pursue the
plantation of colonies in North America, or trade with Russia and
Cathay). There is here an obvious competitive feeling that strengthens a
national identity, and the novelty consists in staging this competition in
the field of the discoveries rather than in comparing the success of kings

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and knights in battles and tournaments. Of course this obvious

relationship between feudal epics and national expansion had been
previously exploited by the Castilians and the Portuguese, as for instance
Camoes' Os Lusiades clearly shows. It is, however, important to realise
that by placing the competition on which European political identities are
built in the field of travel and discovery, the association of economic
profit, search for knowledge and modern nationalism becomes much
more powerful. There are several actions that are ambiguously put into
the same bag of "national deeds": to place a flag in a distant land, to
obtain privileges for the merchants of one's own nation from an oriental
king, to send ambassadors to the great foreign political powers, to have
institutionalised consuls and representatives in the spice ports of the
Eastern Mediterranean, to penetrate unknown rivers (unknown, that is, in
terms of the European cultural tradition), or to circumnavigate the world.
Thus there is an epic identity which belongs to the nation and transcends
political changes and the individual figures of the rulers, an identity that
can be best expressed through popular and soon mythical heroes such as
Francis Drake, and that extends mysteriously to the whole of the
community regardless of class differences and historical changes.
Hakluyt's exaggerations express the ideal of an activity carried abroad, in
confrontation with that which is distant and different, with the
implication of breaking previous limits and attaining a kind of totality
exemplified by the idea of encompassing the whole world:
it can not be denied, but as in all former ages, they [the men of our
nation] have been men full of activity, stirrers abroad, and searchers of
the remote parts of the world, so in this most famous and peerlesse
government of her most excellent Majesty, her subjects through the
speciall assistance and blessing of God, in searching the most opposite
corners and quarters of the world, and to speake plainly, in compassing
the vaste globe of the earth more than once, have excelled all the nations
and people of the earth.48

It is also possible to document what Hakluyt himself thought of his

method of faithful compilation of original texts in their integrity. As
opposed to the so-called universal cosmographies that mixed fact and
fiction (he was probably referring to writers like Miinster) he argued that
the truthful and the profitable should be equated, and for this reason the
correct genre was pregrinationis historia, the history of travel, as witnessed
by the travellers themselves. Thus, as he explained in his preface to the
reader, 'Whatsoever testimonie I have found in any author of authoritie
appertaining to my argument, either stranger or naturall, I have recorded
the same word for word...' . Foreign authors could be used as sources,
but only when they talked about English discoveries or fields-of-

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action. He promised to give bibliographical references and to provide

translations of documents written in a foreign language, but retaining the
original as well. Therefore, without assuming any explicit task of criticism
and interpretation, Hakluyt referred the reliability of the contents of each
document to the authority of each 'personall traveller', so that 'every man
might answere for himselfe, justifie his reports, and stand accountable for
his owne doings'. This method required the rejection of documents of
dubious authorship, but still made it possible to accept as evidence for
English travel and discovery records of the presence of Britons in Asia
Minor fighting for the Roman Emperor, or medieval pilgrims to Judea.
Thus, following what was a common practice in Europe at the time, the
concept of the English nation was extended to the past disregarding any
major historical discontinuity. In this way sixteenth century cultural
patriotism combined the promise of deeds overseas with a rather
uncritical search for historical origins.
Hakluyt's respect for the reliability of the sources, that explains, for
instance, his rejection of Mandeville for the second edition of his Principall
Navigations, was clearly diminished in the case of the German series of
travel collections initiated by Sigmund Feyeraband in 1567, and
continued with great editiorial success by De Bry from 1590 and Hulsius
from 1598. They were compiled in the tradition of Grynaeus' Novus orbis
and Miinster's Cosmographia. Closely associated with highly imaginative
engravers, the printers of Frankfurt often sacrificed accuracy to the main
purpose of selling books by appealing to the popular taste for the exotic.
The reliability of these books largely depended on how the different texts
had been generated and transmitted. The fact that new material could
thus be treated uncritically, as if the medieval tradition of mirabilia had
not been challenged by earlier editors, suggests that where the
information was not sought for immediate political purposes, and where
there was no real contact with distant lands posing practical problems,
there was little concern with distinguishing truth from falsehood within a
method. This was however quite independent from the regular use of the
topos of empirical truthfulness so crucial to the genre of travel accounts,
which was used with different meanings by different authors. Men like
Iosafa Barbara, Ludovico di Varthema, Francisco Afvares, Bernal Diaz del
Castillo, Girolamo Benzoni, Thomas Harriot or Fernao Mendes Pinto may
or may not distort, invent and plagiarise according to particular
situations, but none could afford to present his account as other than the
'true' expression of direct experience.
The case of Elizabethan England exemplifies the interplay of new social
and economic conditions, on the one hand, and the reception and
reinterpretation of an inherited cultural tradition, on the other. This
produces a change of attitudes with important historical consequences.

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163

Between 1575 and the first decades of the seventeenth century

instructions for travellers written in Saxony, Flanders and Denmark by
several humanists- Hieronymus Turlerus, Justus Lipsius and Albertus
Meierus - were translated into English and published for the consumption of merchants and aristocrats; within a few years similar
treatises were written by Englishmen themselves. Meanwhile Hakluyt,
after Ramusio and Eden, edited his huge collection of travel literature,
and was soon afterwards followed by Samuel Purchas, who turned his
collection into kind of universal history to a great extent motivated by
religious interests. This development in the field of travel literature was of
course part of a more general process of reception of continental
humanism, equally affecting cultural forms, themes and concerns. It
could in fact be said that this English Renaissance constituted the most
acute case of a rather late and peripheral but, on the other hand,
extremely effective process of cultural reception, given that it involved a
substantial amount of original appropriation. Travel as a form of
aristocratic education, and travel as a means to national expansion, came
together as part of a cultural transformation by which both classical and
continental learning were put to political use.
In these sense a comparison with France is illustrative. Although
geographically, economically and linguistically well placed at the heart of
Europe, the difficulties in finding a political and religious balance
(evidenced by the civil wars) entailed the relative failure of colonial
initiatives. Much of the Iberian and Italian literature of expansion was
indeed translated, but it is significant that a proper editor of travel
collections or a writer of instructions for travellers were both extremely
rare, and cannot be said to have fluorished until the second half of the
seventeenth century. On the other hand, the early success of universal
histories of civilization and cosmographies, with their emphasis on
encylopedic synthesis rather than genuine novelty, fits with the need for
centralized royal initiative and theological consensus which came to
condition the development of French culture at the end of the century.
Some important changes did however take place in the following
decades as much of the cultural leadership exercised by Italy throughout
the Renaissance shifted, partly for political reasons, to France. From
Montaigne in the 1580s to Descartes in the 1630s, the impact of travel and
travel literature was directly related to epistemological questions
concerning all kinds of scientific pursuits, and often led to sceptical
positions. This was not a complete departure from Ramism, which sought
to define a universal method by analysing the reasoning processes of
ancient philosophers, but the subtlety of the philosophical answers
increased as the artificiality of commonplace methods and the limitations
of Greek concepts became obvious. The response of both Montaigne and

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JOAN-PAU RUBIES

Descartes (the presentation of the latter's Discourse on Method was clearly

inspired by Montaigne's late humanist scepticism) hoped to transcened
both the world of books and the book of the world through a kind of
intuitive instrospection. Thus a "purified" universal self-centered reason
for all mankind was to account at the same time for the diversity of
human opinions and the Catholic faith in ultimate solid knowledge. It is
interesting, in the context of our argument, that Descartes' Method was
presented as the rational alternative to the confusion created by his own
early exploration of science and the world through, respectively, books
and travel.
In this sense it is not misleading to state that Descartes and Bacon were
responding to a similar challenge, albeit rather differently. The roots for
this difference can be found in the cultural history of the preceding
decades. In England, in contrast with France, instructions for travellers
had become a special concern from an early stage, and this eventually led
to the creation of an important body of literature. Although there are a
few early precedents, the process had a clear peak between 1570 and 1630.
The earlier published treatises followed the medieval genre of guides for
pilgrims to the Holy Land. The debate on the usefulness of travel was
already implicit in Erasmus' criticism of pilgrimages, and it was soon
discovered that the fathers of the Church could be used both to prove
and, more often, to disprove the benefits of travel. But perhaps the
fundamental shift expressed by the growth of this kind of literature was
the secularisation of knowledge, implicit in the way different traditions
were combined under newly proclaimed purposes and ideals. For
instance, in Andrew Borde's The fyrst boke of the introduction of knowledge

(c.1547) we find a new form of "empirical cosmography", based on the

author's many years in the continent rather than on the medieval model
of John Mandeville, which essentially was a fiction of pilgrimage within a
theological world-view. In that sense, Borde's book is like an updated
version of Miinster's contemporary cosmographical work. Although part
of a medical treatise, it sought to 'teache a man to speake parte of al
maner of languages, and to knowe the usage and fashion of all maner of
countries...' (not surprisingly, the actual treatment of each "nation" is very
irregular, and more amusing than comprehensive). This kind of
compendia of all sorts of useful information actually followed the
medieval tradition of collections of moral doctrines and marvellous
natural phenomena. An entirely separate genre were manuals for
merchants such as The merchant's avizo of 1616 by a certain B.J., both
practical and moralistic in a very narrow way, and which nevertheless
contributes to show how different traditions and interests influenced the
appearance of the new cultural discourse.

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165

However, what allowed the convergence of these different genres into a

more ambitious discourse were the new educational programmes. In
antiquity, sophisticated rhetorical advice had been associated with the
conventionalised description of cities. Given that rhetoric was also the
privileged tool of humanist education, it is no surprise that, under the
influence of the continental movement, an early discussion of the
advantages of travel was part of Thomas Wilson's Arte of rhetorique
(1553).56 Wilson's Arte, mainly based on the Ad Herennium, Cicero and
Erasmus, actually introduced travel as a favourite theme for rhetorical
excercises as a way of illustrating an oration deliberative. He built the
defence of the goodness of travel on seven categories: honesty, profit,
pleasantness, easyness, lawfulness, praise and necessity. This approach
was later the core of treatises by German humanists such as Jerome Turler
and Hermann Kirchner57 - and it may be not just a coincidence that both
Wilson and Turler had spent some years in Padua studying law. The
career of Wilson is in fact illustrative of the connection between formal
education, travel, and service to the state: after many years in Cambridge
Wilson produced his English treatises on logic and rhetoric (The rule of
reason was first published in 1551 and reprinted many times). A
Protestant, he went to Italy after 1553, exiled from Queen Mary's
persecutions but failed to avoid the Inquisition at Rome. After his return
in 1560 he became ambassador to Portugal, where he dealt with
commercial matters and kept important links, and afterwards
ambassador to the Netherlands. Soon after, in 1577, he entered the Privy
Council as a secretary of state.58
As the association of travel with humanistic education consolidated
and the debate concerning its goodness continued, Wilson's friend Roger
Ascham included an early condemnation of travel, and in particular
travel to Italy, in his The scholemaster (1570), in which he outlined his
educational programme.59 Ancient Rome may have been a model of
civility to imitate, but contemporary Italy was corrupt and dangerous - as
any observer of its political fragmentation and factionalism would realise,
not to mention the vain and licentious customs, the ignorance of the
people, or the domination of 'papistrie'. Announcing a fundamental
reactionary principle, Ascham insisted that formal education (doctrinal,
and by the book) was superior to direct experience, and that the majority
of people were too weak to obtain good moral principles from direct
experience. The moral purpose of travel was never at issue - for travel, all
agreed, involved the search for virtue as much as profit. The question
rather was who should seek to be like Ulysses, and where Circe was to be
found. Ascham, for instance, saw in the importation of Catholic books too
much of a threat (Philip II would have agreed with his defence of strict
censorship and restrictions on travel). But if Ascham the Latinist

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JOAN-PAU RUBIES

portrayed travel as a source of corruption of gentlemen, the Francophile

John Eliot did the opposite when he devised a special method to teach
them French. He thus included a dialogue about "the traveller", perhaps
autobiographical, in his Ortho-epia Gallica (1593), which followed his wellinformed but dry Survay or topographical description of France (1592).

It was in the 1570s and 1580s that translations of foreign texts became
decisive in creating a distinctive genre, in which humanist rhetoric and
Ramist logic combined to provide the travelling gentlemen with a means
to educate himself, among other things, as a future servant of the
Commonwealth. Fadrique Furio Ceriol's Of Counsells and counselers
appeared in English in 1570, translated by Thomas Blundeville from the
Italian version of Ulloa (apparently at the request of the son of Baldasare
Castiglione). In this treatise of 1559 the Valencian humanist presented
travel (together with rhetoric, the knowledge of foreign languages, or the
reading of histories) as one of the essential educational requirements for
the kind of world-wise courtier-counsellor he envisaged.60 He insisted
that the knowledge of states other than one's own was necessary for a
good understanding of politics, and that comparison was the basis for
self-criticism. In fact, a true understanding of morality involved the
rejection of the facile dichotomy in which everybody from one place (such
as home) was conceived of as good, and everybody from another place
(such as abroad), bad. The traveller should in any case be a careful and
systematic observer. In this way Furio pre-empted reactionary attacks
such as Roger Ascham's, or those by Bishop Hall early in the seventeenth
century.
Furio's treatise has the added significance of representing the fruits of a
truly cosmopolitan Erasmian humanism which had connected Spain,
Italy, the Low Countries, Paris and Germany, but was to be squashed by
Philip II's reactionary Catholicism. For example Furio himself
(1527-1592), who had travelled and studied all over Europe and
published his books in Louvain and Basel, was to be presecuted by the
Inquisition for his defence of the translation of the Bible into vernacular,
and eventually recalled to the court of Spain with the promise of a pardon
(1559-1564). This crisis coincided with Philip II's decision to restrict travel
for his subjects, and the price of the pardon seems to have been silence
and dependance. Furio spent the rest of his life as a frustrated courtier in
Madrid, offering liberal advice that was rarely followed (although he was
allowed to assist in Luis de Requesens' attempt to pacify Flanders). He
did not publish any further books.
Despite Ascham, what the Spanish prince had repressed flourished in
England. The translation of Furio's book was of itself less significant than
the fact that it was part of a wider context of translations in which the
idea of travel played an important role. This suggest that the influence of

INSTRUCTIONS FOR TRAVELLERS

167

continental humanism over the cultural transformation of the English

gentry was still an ongoing and to a great extent unfinished process,
despite the existence of an early generation of English contributions to the
genre of educational treatises for the nobility, from Thomas Elyot's Boke
named the governour of 1531 to Thomas Hoby's late translation of
Catiglione's Courtier in 1561 (again, it is not coincidental that both Elyot
and Hoby were ambassadors in Europe, nor that Hoby spent the same
crucial years in Padua as Thomas Wilson). The ideal counsellor, the
perfect ambassador and the complete gentleman - all of them travellers superseded the governor and the courtier precisely because they could be
seen to provide more definite answers to complex dilemmas, such as
moral deversity or the clash between religious morality and political
rationality. Within this educational genre, the crucial intellectual threads
provided by Platonic morality and Ciceronian rhetoric did not so much
disappear as transform themselves.
The first full treatises on travel written for gentlemen were translations
of Turler's general discussion of the subject (1575), Meier's method for
decribing countries and cities (1589) and Lipsius' letter of advice to a
young traveller (1592). Following these translations a specifically English
genre took off. It took various forms, to begin with a "personal letter" by
an experienced relative or friend addressed to a younger traveller. Those
written by Philip Sidney, Robert Devereux, Francis Bacon and Fulke
Greville recall, for instance, the epistle by Lipsius (originally written in
1578), but the models were not always continental. Thus William Cecil's
letter of 1571 to Edward Manners, the young Earl of Rutland, seems to
have influenced this sub-genre. Before they were published these letters
were circulated in manuscript versions, copied, re-written, and sometimes
newly sent under a different name. Alternatively, the advice for
travellers adopted a more systematic and informative form, with the help
of extensive discussions and "methodical" schemes such as those
produced in the early 1600's by Robert Dallington (1563-1637) and
Thomas Palmer (1540-1626), with Turler and Zwinger as models.
Dallington's Method for travell (c.1605) concentrated on practical advice
rather than discussing whether travel was good or bad, and was
published as the introduction to a well-informed historical cosmography
of France that is remarkable for the depth of its political message. Thus,
following a precedent already set by Jerome Turler when appending a
description of Naples to his theoretical discussion, Dallington's "art of
travel" was conceived as the general rule, for which the description of
France was but one example. It can be usefully compared to Dallington's
own Survey of the Great Dukes state of Tuscany, which was also published
in 1605 with an 'analysis of the discourse' summarising the argument
(see figures 1 and 2). It can be seen that the method, clear and

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JOAN-PAU RUBIES

';*!ft.

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wh*t degree;hojp confincdjjorv theajrc is co.-utiancd. c$-c

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, Gouerned: hereobferue the people s naturey<tndinclinniion,
bis djettApptre^t\nntA^e, & vhdt clfcfbxll bcnote-ivtrthic.
Figure 1 from Robert Dallington, The view of France (London, 2nd printing c. 1605).

comprehensive, is consonant with the actual cosmography (this was not

the case with Turler, for whom the example constituted a separate piece of
rhetoric). There are few differences between Dallington's two tables,
suggesting that the scheme valid for describing Tuscany was roughly

INSTRUCTIONS FOR TRAVELLERS

169

The Analyfis of chis difcourfc.

("Cofmo' g f J p!-e.

T Hereof the Clime,the

I Degree , the Ha let
I that mitt the Jilpofitionofthciyrc,&c.

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Figure 2
1605).

from Robert Dallington, A survey of the Great Dukes state of Tuscany (London,

adequate for France too. Those differences which exist mainly respond to
the addition of general advice on travel to the decription of France. On
the other hand, the similarity of the basic topics for the process of
observation is evident, although the method for Tuscany is more
elaborate. Dallington's books are especially valuable because they
combine historical information with direct observation. The Method for
travell was originally intended as practical advice for Francis Manners

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JOAN-PAU RUBIES

(the future Earl of Rutland) on the occasion of an embassy. Dallington,

originally a schoolteacher, was then his secretary. He would later enter
the privy chamber of Prince Henry, for whom he wrote a set of political
aphorisms illustrated with Guicciardini's history of Italy (1613).
Palmer's comtemporary An essay of the meanes how to make our travailes
into forraine countries the more profitable and honourable (1606) was also

dedicated to Prince Henry. This methodical treatise was particularly full

and included thorough discussions of different kinds travellers, why they
should travel, what they should observe, and how to understand different
peoples, laws and customs. Although this implied discussing merchants,
soldiers, ambassadors, spies and religious exiles, the author was
concerned above all with the increasing importance of travel for young
gentlemen, in particular in England. His argument was that what had
started as a private activity (and his own method was originally for
personal use) had by now achieved the proportions of a collective
phenomenon in which the lack of moral criteria was doing much damage
to the commonwealth. The essay offered a 'perfect rule' so that travel
might be properly practiced and not be confused with disorderly
activities. Palmer's moralistic approach did not prevent him
from framing the questions in a wide and well-informed cosmographical
perspective, in particular when discussing the nature of different peoples,
with a striking use of concepts such as 'civility and barbarousness'.
'freedom and servility', 'religiousness and profanenesse', together with
the more common ones of 'warlike of effeminatenesse' and various
humours and constitutions. In fact, examples from France and Italy were
discussed together with others form the West Indies or Turkey, effectively
breaking the distinction between methods for travel within Europe and
travel outside. The four analytical tables which accompanied the treatise
'as an aid to memory' can therefore be said to include methodical guide to
all different aspects that had come to characterise the genre of instructions
for travellers, that is, both the moral implications and the technical
aspects of travel and observation.
Methods such as those by Dallington and Palmer were not isolated.
Thus, one of the later editions of the travellers breviat prepared by Robert
Johnson on the basis of Botero's Relationi was enlarged to include new
chapters 'Of Observation' and 'Of travell' which constituted yet another
method. Similarly, Fynes Morison began his survey of those states which
he had visited in his travels (each of them systematically discussed 'upon
several heads') with a discourse on 'Travelling in general'. And of
course, private instructions often remained as manuscripts, such as the
method by Edmond Tyllney, which prefaced his 'Topographicall
description of regiments and policies' written c.1600.

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171

To summarize, although some occasional travel guides (such as Robert

Rowlands' The post for divers part of the world of 1576, translated from a
German book) just covered basic geographical information about
distances between places and the location of cities and universities, the
more characteristic "methods" offered moral and intellectual advice for a
particular social group involved in a new activity, and could include
humanist advice on lists of books to read (Sidney's 1580 letter), "Ramist"
tables which classified subjects for a proper process of observation (as
used by Robert Dallington and William Davison), or cosmographical
information that stretched far enough to discuss the customs of the
American Indians (conspicuous, as I have said, in Palmer's essay). Several
of these writers were obsessed with the preservation of an uncontaminated religion, particularly against the influences of papists and
Jesuits, but a few treatises were also written by Catholics, and thus they
were not exclusively Protestant phenomena.
What is clear about these works is that they were produced within a
fairly defined social context. They resulted from the interaction of a group
of "cosmopolitan" noblemen of the last years of the reign of Elizabeth, a
court faction particularly sympathetic to colonial expansion and to
political intervention in the continent, with those humanist-educated
scholars who were often their friends, secretaries and advisors. Thus, on
the one hand, high-ranking aristocrats like Philip Sidney and the Earls of
Leicester, Essex, Bedford and Rutland, or adventurous characters like
Walter Raleigh, and on the other hand well educated professionals like
Thomas Wilson, Francis Walsingham, William Davison, Francis Bacon,
Richard Hakluyt, Gabriel Harvey, Fulke Greville, Thomas Blundeville,
Thomas Harriot, Robert Dallington and Thomas Palmer. In fact this
second group ranged from well-established members of the gentry like
Blundeville, to men belonging to merchant circles like Philip Jones, who
on Hakluyt's advice translated Albert Meier's method for travellers from
Latin into English and dedicated it to Francis Drake. One could say that,
while in some ways the nobility provided leadership for the gentry as a
whole, it also seems true that part of the gentry performed an educational
role equivalent to that of the professional classes. While the Queen
herself, typically cautious, did not play a very active role in the
movement (in fact travel to the continent was restricted through the use
of exit visas), the coherence in cultural outlook within her powerful Privy
Council was central to the development of colonial ventures and also of
the various genres that accompanied travel as a cultural practice. In this
sense, despite the existence of important factions within the Council at
different times, there existed and important common ground both in the
Protestant and nationalistic policies they pursued and in the methods
they used to achieve them. For instance, they all attempted to set up rival

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JOAN-PAU RUBIES

systems of secret information (the development of espionage, especially

by secretary Walsingham, was not perhaps by chance simultaneous with
the methodising of travellers' observations) and they all channelled
courtly patronage towards men at their service engaged in artistic,
intellectual, colonial or displomatic activities. They all depended, above
all, on the adaptation of humanistic skills and of the formal training
received at the Universities to their political practices.
Therefore, while in studying the development of travel literature in
Elizabethan England it is possible to follow particular influences and
models relating to both genres and ideas, one should extend the analysis
beyond discourse. What enabled the cultural change to take a very
definite shape in the space of a few years was the interconnectedness of a
social world extending from the university to the court, and involving
various semi-independent figures. Travel and classical learning were
substantially analogous means which empowered a new elite with a
language of secular politics, both moral and practical. It is indeed
remarkable the extent to which the 'methods' for travelling went beyond
the mere theoretical models provided by writers of logic and rhetoric, to
become a practice discussed and exercised by actual travellers who read,
and sometimes wrote, about the countries they visited. Very often the
very scholars who wrote treatises in the vernacular and read foreign
books had also travelled abroad as tutors, secretaries and ambassadors.
By the time George Sandys, Fynes Morison and Thomas Coryat
published their personal travel narratives in the 1610s, they could
express, with seriousness in some cases and extravagance in others, a selfsustaining myth of a personal identity in the figure of the scholarly
traveller. Their task was to articulate not only England's relationship
with other European nations, but also an idea of European civility
confronted with the Turkish-dominated Near East, an idolatrous and
exotic India, a virgin New World, or a decadent Catholic Europe. Behind
these scenarios lay the source of ancient wisdom, the possibility of
commercial profit, a colonial Utopia, or the ruins of classical civilization.
The extent to which these writers depended upon the direct application of
the dialectical methods to construct their narratives was variable - the
methods could be used actively to shape discourse, or passively to
analyse it. What mattered in the end was neither the recovery of Aristotle
nor the triumph of Ramus, but rather the development of attitudes which
stimulated analytical induction, linguistic awareness, and sceptical
subjectivism (see figure 3). The more aristocratic and better educated
Sandys, with his selective shifts from personal observations to historical
and antiquarian concerns, shaped his narrative according to the
ideological demands of a sophisticated but conservative Protestantism.
He relied on his poetical skills and erudition and certainly used the

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173

Tl!iomas Coryate,
TRAVAILER
Forthe nglijl)\iiu,and

thegood

ojrthhKingdom:

To all his inferiour Coumrcymen, Greeting: Elpeliallj to ihl Sirtm-Mll Caltlrmm ,lhitviiit thefir(I FndiJ tf nitric
Moncth, auhc MermaideinBreadftrcet. From the Court of
the great Migul, rlfidint itihtTrtvnt>f Afmerc siml>iBMirnt
India.

Ptintedby W.Iaggardjjnd Henjjr Fetherflon.

\<l6

Figure 3 The extravagance of Thomas Coryat was a form of popular self-fashioning, but
his generation of travel writers relied upon a serious methodical training based
on the dialectics of Peter Ramus. This portrait is from the English version of his
Logike (London, 1574)

anlytical schemes much less than Morison, who industriously constructed

the main section of his enormous Itinerary as a systematic cosmography
for all the countries he had visited, openly using a fixed set of headings.
Coryat's Crudities, on the other hand, were even less subtle than
Morison's Itinerary, and stood out more as a event in itself than as a
polished piece of rhetoric. In him the popular adventurer of the kind
Thomas Nashe had described fictionally took over entirely from the
prospective secretary to a great lord, as Morison was. The differences
between these three travellers reflect different social standings (nobility,
gentry, literate commoner) and thus alternative strategies of selffashioning, but also indicate a cultural continuum in the development of
this self-fashioning through travel literature. It is this continuum which,
with perspective, seems the more remarkable, since it indicates a broad
basis for the consolidation of the traveller as a socio-cultural type. By the
time Francis Bacon and Henry Peacham published, respectively, an essay
Of travel (1625) and The complete gentleman (1622), they could articulate an

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existing consensus about the new type of late Renaissance courtier, who,
following Furio's fundamental intuition, was now, among other things,
necessarily a traveller: '... where may wisdome be had, but from many
men, and in many places?'
It is possible to summarize in two ideas the social and political
movements that connected the reception of humanism with the activity of
travel in a way unique to England. On the one hand the aristocratic,
dominant classes underwent a deep transformation. This affected their
economic resources and attitudes, their relationship with the Crown and
their education and way of living. Parallel to this, a group of London
merchants succeeded in launching England towards overseas expansion
with the support of some influential courtiers and a few scholars. While
it is true that the country seems to have been developing the economic
structures necessary to become an expanding power, a certain political
and cultural effort was requied to put this potential into practice.
In this respect we can read our documents on travel as having an
important significance: the treatises written by Turler and Palmer, and the
letters from Lipsius, Sidney and Essex, associated travel with the
education of the young aristocrat at a time when English noblemen
initiated what was to become the tradition of the Grand Tour in Europe.
The humanists wanted to teach the right mental attitude, and their project
found many imitators among noblemen who also wanted to moralize.
Eden, Hakluyt and Purchas provided both the logistical information and
(in the case of Hakluyt) the nationalistic mythology necessary to plan
effectively the pirating and trading expeditions and to obtain social and
financial support for them. By the time Purchas published his various
volumes, culminating with the Pilgrimes of 1625, the aim had transcended
practical concerns and addressed the interpretation of the history of the
world in a kind of English-Protestant synthesis that may surpass Botero's
Italian-Catholic Universal relations of thirty years earlier. Other works
dealt specifically with the categories of classification to be used by the
keen observer, as we see in Meier (1589), Davison (1633), Dallington
(c.1605), Peacham (1622) or Bacon (1625). Finally, other treatises, such as
William Bourne's A regiment for the sea (London, 1574) or A book called the

treasure for travailers (London, 1578), both reprinted several times at least
until the middle of the seventeenth century, offered the sort of practical
information
for navigation essential to the development of a nautical
81
science.
English navigational books were usually updated versions of such
works as Pedro de Medina's Arte de navegar (Valladolid, 1545) and Martin
Cortes' Breve compendio de la sphera y arte de navegar (Sevilla, 1551). This

genre had developed in the Iberian peninsula (in Portugal since at least
the late fifteenth century) in relationship with the voyages that had

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175

enabled the Portuguese and the Castilians to attack other peoples

overseas and to organise their colonial empires. It complemented another
important contemporary development, map-making. Throughout the
sixteenth century Iberian rulers consistently sponsored this kind of
science, conceived as essential to their empires. Similar works published
in the Spanish Netherlands, such as Gemma Frisius' Principiis Astronomiae
et Cosmographiae ... (Antwerp 1530), were also influential. Their diffusion
in England was sponsored by a few noblemen and scholars committed to
privateering activities and imperial dreams - men such as Charles
Howard, Lord High Admiral from 1584, or polyfaceted personalities like
Thomas Blundeville and John Dee.82 Blundeville's case, in particular,
confirms that connections between technical sciences, formal dialectics
and humanistic disciplines such as history or politics were not casual.
Thus in 1594 he published the first edition of His exercises, a very
successful collection of treatises on astronomy, cosmography, geography
and navigation written for young gentlemen and which he dedicated to
Francis Bacon's sister Elizabeth. This genre could therefore bring together
the practical advice of a maritime trader skilled in mathematics like
Bourne and the interest of a humanist gentleman like Blundeville. Its
concern with the mathematical calculation of longitudes and the
identification of time, distances and routes, reveals a practice not far
removed from the inductive methods and the social purposes expressed
by Francis Bacon's ideal of science.
The case of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) can perhaps illuminate in a more
specific way the difficult relationship between empirical concerns,
concepts of method and the idea of travel as education. His essay Of travel,
one of the latest, is as I have already indicated rather conventional in its
contents. However, its genesis seems more complex and interesting. There
is reason to suppose that Bacon participated in the collective elaboration
and transmission of an influential standardised letter of "instructions for
a young traveller". Probably inspired by previous letters from Lord
Burghley, Justus Lipsius and Philip Sidney, this complex composition
was variously attributed to Thomas Bodley, to Robert Devereux, the
Second Earl of Essex - who would have sent it to the fifth Earl of Rutland
in January 1596 - and to Fulke Greville.83 Its contents, ranging from
analytical lists of categories and sub-categories to the moral themes
characteristic of epistles and essays, are a clear proof that the "dialectical"
and the "rhetorical" traditions were not completely separate: both
contributed to each other while offering complementary approaches to a
major educational concern and programme.
It is for instance interesting to realise how philosophical are the ideas
expressed by "Essex" in the letter published in 1633. Its moral purpose
and its rhetorical character in fact correspond with the cultural context

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that made possible Philip Sidney's revised Arcadia, published by Fulke

Greville in 1590. That is, there was far more than practical advice to be
given to the traveller: in fact a whole aesthetic theory - basically the one
defined by Sidney in his Defence of poesy - was involved in the resolution
of moral and political dilemmas.84 Thus the letter identified 'morall
Philosophy' as the key subject: 'the gifts and excellencies of the mind (...)
are the same as those of the body, Beauty [gratefull and acceptable forms
and sweetness of behaviour] and Strength [active power which maketh us
perform good and great things]'.85 This "strength" may be variously
interpreted as "grace", "faith", "spirit" or "will": 'behaviour and good
forme may be gotten by education; and health, and even temper of
minde, by good observation; but if there be not in nature some partner in
this active strength, it can never be attained by any industry ...'86
Following from this anthropological analysis, it becomes explicit that
the link of travel with morality has a great deal to do with identity and
cultural forms of the self. This had indeed been a central issue for decades
- as in Furio Ceriol, in Turler, in Montaigne or here in Essex: 'In
discovering your passions, and meeting with them, give no way, or
dispense with your selfe, resolving to conquer your selfe in all'. Then the
letter dwells on knowledge, its importance and its different parts (Divine,
Civil etc). Civil knowledge is itself subdivided into three categories
recurrent in the genre of instructions for travellers: study (the reading of
histories), conference (visiting wise men), and observation (methods).
This is clearly a development of the humanist programme: the
"histories" that should be read are the classical and the modern, because
they contain political advice. The "wise men" that are to be visited are the
university scholars, and no longer the medieval hermit-saints. The
obvious models are again Justus Lipsius, whose advice was sought all
over Europe, or Philip Sidney, the Elizabethan cultural hero who met and
corresponded with Hubert Languet. Finally, observation is a 'science of
causes' with 'the proportion and likeness' between natures, fortunes,
actions, states and times - that is, seeking general relationships amongst
particulars. The letter ends with the very "Baconian" remark that the
traveller should seek true knowledge based on strong and clear
judgement, rather than the more rhetorical and superficial table-talk of so
many contemporaries. In this language, method is the same as order.
The most interesting thing is that these letters of advice to travellers
were not simply at the root of Bacon's essay, but also - and in particular
this first 1596 "Essex" letter - of passages of his 1605 Advancement of
learning. Coincidences between these two documents relate mainly to
moral culture, but other sections of Bacon's scientific programme bear an
important resemblance to other instructions for travellers which we know
he had among his papers. Thus it seems that the connection between the

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177

figure of the traveller and the new empirical sciences exists not only in a
general sense of the substitution of theological assumptions and
hierarchies by formalised, institutionalised, critical and empirical
"common-sense" vernacular genres. A more precise connection can also
be established by looking at the genesis of scientific ideals and
programmes, and their inspiration in humanistic educational concerns
revised in the light of the theory and practice of travel and travel writing.
To be more specific, the concept of "method" which underlies the several
works of Turler, Zwinger and Palmer as well as those by Meier,
Dallington and Davison, and which also informs pieces superficially
belonging to a different genre, such as Fulke Greville's letter or Bacon's
essay, not only has a recognised source of inspiration in the new humanist
dialectics (a connection quite evident in Zwinger's work) but also its
radical development in Francis Bacon's Advancement of learning.
Bacon's discussion of method in this work is illustrative: a part of logic,
but clearly addressing rhetorical practices, 'method' is thus concerned
with exposition insofar as it affects not only 'use of knowledge', but
likewise the progression of knowledge'. Bacon was worried that some
methods, by presenting a final product of knowledge rather than its roots
(i.e. by being too rhetorical), actually hindered its own progression. He
therefore thought that Ramus' fundamental intuition was right, even
though his development went astray: 'method considereth not only the
disposition of the argument or subject, but likewise the propositions: not
as to their truth or matter, but as to their limitation and manner'.
This attempt to organize kinds or propositions is certainly what the
authors of "instructions for travellers" tried and, sometimes, achieved, by
suggesting what categories should frame a description of a foreign
country. Bacon was concerned that a method should not constrain the
particular observations and propositions of different subject matters to
take the form of homogenous, fruitless generalities. He wanted to see (to
return to a fundamental distinction) the "roots" of induction and
invention, rather than just the "body of the tree" presented as a final
product. The problem of truth was best left to the quality of the traveller,
who was meant to respond with honesty (and, one should add, freed
from Bacon's famous "idols" or prejudices) to direct experiences. This
would of course produce a large quantity of measurable and convertible
observations, in a massive programme of inductive, progressive
construction of knowledge.
And this is, I believe, where we found Robert Hooke some three93

quarters of a century later.

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Notes
1.

2.
3.
4.

5.

6.

7.

Quoted from Jerome Turler, The traveller (London, 1575), p. 22. The attribution to
Heraclitus belongs to Clemens of Alexandria. This article is part of an earlier piece
which received useful suggestions from various people in 1988, in particular from
Peter Burke, Anthony Pagden and Justin Stagl. I also wish to thank David Armitage,
Peter Miller and Chris Pinney for comments on various drafts of this version. This
article now forms the introduction to a longer manuscript on the same subject.
Robert Knox, An historical relation of Ceylon, edited by S.D. Saparadamu, (Dehiwala,
1958), p.lxxiv.
'Quid est methodus? Ars quae quemadmodum disciplina omnis redigi in artem et
certain rationem possit demonstrat', a definition by Francis Hotman. Quoted from N.
Gilbert, Renaissance concepts of method, (New York, 1960), p.75.
S.D. Saparadamu in Knox (1958), p.xxiii. Saparadamu's edition includes a welldocumented introduction using manuscript material on Knox's life. The main
research was conducted by D.W Ferguson at the end of the nineteenth century. C.R.
Boxer gives a more recent appraisal in 'Ceylon through puritan eyes. Robert Knox in
the kingdom of Kandy 1660-1679' in History Today IV (1954) : 660-7.
Knox wrote in his dedication to the directors of the East India Company that he
himself perused and 'drew into a method' his papers, dividing them under four
headings, i.e. 'the first concerning the country and products of it, the second
concerning the king and his government, the third concerning the inhabitants and
their religions and customs, and the last concerning our surprize, detainment and
escape' (ibid. p. lxxxi). However, it is likely that this ordering was done with the help
of John Strype, a man with antiquarian interests, since, in a letter to him written in
1713 concerning a proposed revised edition of his book, Knox confessed that he
wished that Strype had been there to help, his own additions being only matter of fact
'not fitt so to be crowded into a new impression, the methodising thereof being
beyond my capasity...' (p.xlix). This correspondance is in Cambridge University
Library, Ms V 151. The copy of the first edition of the relation with Knox's own
additions is kept in the British Museum. Finally, a Sinhalese vocabulary in the British
Museum Liabrary (Sloane 1039, ff. 162-5) witnesses the continuation of Hooke's
relationship with Knox.
On methods for travellers see J. Stagl, 'Die apodemik oder "reisekunst" als methodik
der Sozialforschung vom humanismus bis zur aufklrung' in M.Rassem and J. Stagl,
Statistik und Staatsbeschreibung in der neuzei (Padeborn, 1980) and by the same author
'The methodising of travel in the 16th century: a tale of three cities', History and
Anthropology, IV, 2 (1990): 303-338. This article is particularly valuable and I must
thank Justin Stagl for an early exchange of manuscripts before its publication. Closely
related is S. Christensen, ' The image of Europe in Anglo-German travel literature', in
J. Card and J.C.Margolin Voyager la Renaissance, 'Actes du colloque de Tours 1983'
(Paris, 1987). A general interpretation of travel literature in this period in J.P.Rubis,
'New worlds and Renaissance ethnology', History and Anthropology, VI, 2-3 (1993) :
157-197.
Some of these texts are identified in M.Hodgen, Early anthropology in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries (University of Pennsylvania, 1964; pbk ed. 1971), pp. 185-8.1 base
the present study of 'instructions for travellers' (as they were received, adapted or
written in England) on Thomas Wilson, Arte of rhtorique, 1553 (Derrick ed. 1982);
Fadrique Furi Ceriol, El concejo i consejeros del prncipe, Anvers 1559 (H.Mchoulan
ed. Raison et alterit chez Fadrique Furi Ceriol, Paris 1973), translated in English by

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179

Thomas Blundeville as Of counsells and counselers, London 1570 (Facs ed. K.L. Selig,
Florida 1963); Hieronymus Turlerus, De peregrinationis et agro Neapolitano libri II,
(Argentorati 1574), translated in English by William Howe as The traveller of Jerome
Turler (London, 1575); Justus Lipsius, Epistolarium seledarum centuria prima, (London
1586), translated (only epist. xxii) in English by John Stradling as A direction for
travailers (London, 1592); Albertus Meierus, Methodus describendi regiones, urbes et
arces..., (Helmstadt 1587), translated in English by Philip Jones as Certain briefe and
speciall instructions for gentlemen, merchants, students, souldiers, marriners etc. (London.
1589); Robert Dallington, The view of France (London 1604; reprinted with 'Method for
travell' c.1605) and A survey of the Great Dukes state of Tuscany (London, 1605);
Mercurius Britannicus [Rev. Joseph Hall] Mundus alter et idem... (1605), translated in
English by the author as The discovery of a new world; Thomas Palmer, An essay of the
meanes how to make our travailes into forraine countries the more profitable and honourable
(London, 1606); Thomas Coryate, Coryate's crudities, hastily gobbled up (London, 1611);
Richard Johnson trans. [from Giovanni Botero], The travellers' breviat (5th edition,
London, 1616); Fynes Morison, An itinerary (...) containing his ten years' travel (London,
1617); Joseph Hall, Quo vadis? a just censure of travell as it is commonly undertaken by the
gentlemen of our nation (London,1617); Henry Peacham, The complete gentleman
(London, 1622); Francis Bacon, Essays (London, 1625); Secretary Davison, Robert
Devereux and Philip Sidney (B.F. ed. [Francis Bacon?]), Profitable instructions
describing what speciall observations are to be taken by travellers in all nations, states and
countries (London, 1633).
8.

9.

I will discuss and illustrate this concept throughout the article. Among special sudies
see in particular Gilbert (1960), whose analysis of Renaissance concepts of method is
the logical starting point for any study of the humanistic transformation of Greek
methodology (mainly, but not exclusively, Aristotelian) into something much wider.
Gilbert's book is especially valuable because he also identifies the late Renaissance as
the central period of cultural transition leading to modern epistemology. He focuses
on concepts of method in what Renaissance writers understood as 'the arts', in
particular the processes of 'finding out', 'presenting' and 'demonstrating' within the
range of disciplines inherited from classical thought. Gilbert thus marks a distance
between sixteenth-century methods and seventeenth-century science. He is aware of
of the wide range of applications of the concept of method at the end of the sixteenth
century (which makes it difficult to give a single definition), but limits his analysis to
the more strictly pihlosophical definitions. While exploring a practical and rather
original use of 'method' neglected by Gilbert, I will here take for granted much of his
discussion of philosophical controversies.
The study of the science of the period and its transformation, of course in the wide
cultural context conditioned by the different forms of Christianity and by the
humanist inheritance, has a strong relevance for the argument of this article. Among
the vast bibliography, some recent studies have proved especially illuminating: James
R. Jacob, '"By an Orphean Charm": science and the two cultures in seventeenthcentury England', in Ph. Mack and M.C.Jacob (eds.) Politics and culture in early-modern
Europe. Essays in honour of H.G. Koenigsberger (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 231-49; L.Giard,

'Remapping knowledge, reshaping institutions', in S. Pumfrey, P.Rossi and

M.Slawinski (eds.) Science, culture and popular belief in Renaissance Europe (Manchester,
1991), pp. 19-47; M.Slawinski, 'Rhetoric and science/rhetoric of science/rhetoric as
science', in ibid. pp. 71-99; More arguable, but also useful, is B.Vickers' introduction
to Vickers (ed.) Occult and scientific mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1984),

where he counterpoises occult and scientific "mentalities", strangely forgetting

religious ones. Among earlier studies discussing late Renaissance rhetoric and

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JOAN-PAU RUBIES
dialectic, W.Ong, Ramus, method and the decay of dialogue (Cambridge Mass. 1958),

10.

11.
12.

13.
14.

Gilbert (1960) and L.Jardine, Francis Bacon: discovery and the art of discourse
(Cambridge, 1974) are particularly important. More recently A.Grafton and L.Jardine
From humanism to the humanities. (London, 1986).
Jardine (1974) ch. 1 stresses the ambiguities of the idea of method in the dialectical
tradition, and contains important precisions on the differences between the rhetorical
and pedagogic tradition of the humanists (to which the instructions for travellers
belong), the neo-Aristotelian thought of Padua, and Francis Bacon's ideas of scientific
method. C.Vasoli ' La logica' in G.Arnaldi and M.Pastore Stocchi (eds.) Storia della
cultura Veneta vol.III (1980), pp.35-73, also insists that Zabarella's methodus, as
opposed to Ramus', was conceived of as part of a demonstrative rather than empirical
science.
For England see W.S.Howell Logic and rhetoric in England 1500-1700 (Princeton, 1956)
as well as the works by Lisa Jardine mentioned above.
I have used B.Reynolds' English translation of Jean Bodin's Method for the easy
comprehension of History (New York, 1945). The dedication to Jean Tessier (pp. 1-8) and
the fifth chapter on 'the correct evaluation of histories' (pp.85 ff) are particularly
useful in clarifying Bodin's understanding of the relationship between universality
and particularity in history. Bodin's aim is really to define and assess general laws
and principles. The book, it has often been remarked, is as interesting as it is complex
and often arbitrary. The third chapter alone corresponds to the dialectical (that is,
topical) idea of method, and is simply described as 'an aid to memory'.
On Ramus and methods see also Ong (1956) and Gilbert (1960).
Recently, Victoria Kahn has suggested that the Machiavellian rhetoric of Bacon and
Ralegh was also influenced by the methodological concerns of the late Renaissance,
although I would disagree with her suggestion that interest in method was 'in tension
with the traditional moral claims of Renaissance humanism' (Victoria Kahn,
Machiavellian rhetoric from the Counter-Reformation to Milton, Princeton 1994, p.107). We

have, for instance, a wonderfully analytical method by his secretary William Temple
of Philip Sidney's Defence of poesy, which can be read as an Elizabethan manifesto of
the essential connections between anthropology, epistemology, politics, morality and
aesthetics. Virtue, no less NeoPlatonic than Machiavellian, was one of the key
concepts that was methodised. Thus "Machiavellianism" was not seen by its
followers as independent fron ethical considerations, although it certainly coloured a
more secular approach to ethical dilemmas. The same can be said about methods for
travellers, which always combine moral and technical concerns. Of course, Sidney is
seen by Kahn as part of the circle of reception of Neostoicism and Tacitism in the
Elizabethan court which many researchers identify with the more activist Protestant
faction led first by the Earl of Leicester and then by the second Earl of Essex, and
which would have continuity in the early Stuart court through figures like Francis
Bacon. I believe that this interpretation is roughly correct, but needs some
qualification: the members of these successive circles (since we are talking about at
least two generations) had neither identical philosophical and religious views, nor
did they form a single compact faction; they shared and cooperated, but then they
also shifted and changed. What is interesting is the fluidity of the cultural system
and the extraordinary amount of personal connections that it facilitated, but it is
difficult to imagine Sidney in agreement with Cristopher Marlowe or Giordano Bruno
over many subjects. Furthermore, there are distinctions to be made between
Machiavellianism, Neostoicism and Tacitism, and the links between these intellectual
influences do not justify ignoring the distinctions.
15. Thomas Blundeville The true order... (London, 1574), ff. H3v-H4v.

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181

16. Blundeville, The arte of logike (London, 1599), pp. 56-58. Aconzio, like Bacon later,
defined 'method' as both research and exposition: 'method is a certaine right way
whereby we may search out the knowledge of any thing and, having attained it, how
to teach the same commodiously to any other...' (ibid, p.56) which can be usefully
compared to a contemporary English translation of Ramus: 'the methode is a
disposition by the which amonge many propositions of one sorte, and by their
disposition knowen, that thing which is absolutely more clear is first placed, and
secondly that which is next (...) from the most generall to the speciall and singular' (P.
Ramus, The logike of the moste excellent philosopher P. Ramus Martyr, London 1574,
p.94). Aconzio's method has been discussed by Gilbert (1960),pp.l81-6. Gilbert
stresses that Aconzio seems more modern than he actually is and that he remained a
marginal figure. Certainly his language of causes in his discussion of history is
heavily Aristotelian. On the other hand, his emphases on systematic analysis, reliance
on inductive processes, and practical uses are all interesting - as it is his repeated use
by Blundeville.
17. W. Ong, 'Commonplace rhapsody: Ravisius Textor, Zwinger and Shakespeare' in
R.Bolgar (ed.) Classical influences on European culture A.D.1500-1700 (Cambridge, 1976),
pp. 91-118.
18. Concerning Bodin's Theatrum there is now an interesting study by Ann Blair, who
identifies this encyclopdia of the natural world as essentially a specialised book of
commonplaces. This establishes a clear link between the basic tools of humanist
learning and later scientific concerns, in particular Baconian science. See A.Blair,
'Humanist methods in natural philosophy: the commonplace book', in Jounal of the
History of ideas LIII, 4 (1992) : 541-51. What makes Bodin's contribution particularly
relevant is of course his central position in the fundamental political and religious
debates of the time. It is also worth remarking that his combined works on history
and natural philosophy demonstrate the basic methodological analogy between the
human and physical sciences (both conceived as historical) in the mind of the
humanist thinker of the late Renaissance.
19. J.R.Hale (ed.) The travel journal of Antonio de Beatis (London, 1979), p.56.
20. See Pellegrini Scrittori. Viaggatori toscani del trecento in Terrasanta a cura di Antonio
Lanza e Marcelina Troncarelli (Firenze, 1990) and Francesco Suriano, Il trattato di terra
Santa e dell 'Oriente (Venezia, 1524), respectively.
21. Hale (1979), pp. 22-41, 'The sources of the Renaissance travel journal'.
22. Iosafa Barbaro 'Viaggio di Iosafa Barbaro alla Tana e nella Persia' in Giovanni Battista
Ramusio (ed.), Navigazioni e viaggi a cura di M.Milanesi, VI vols. (Torino, 1978-), III,
pp.485-6.
23. Ludovico de Varthema, Itinerario ed. P.Giudici (Milano, 2nd ed. 1929), p. 335.
24. On the special character of Venetian humanism see M.L.King, Venetian humanism in
an age of patrician dominance (Princeton, 1986). For the sixteenth century W.J.Bouwsma,
Venice and the defence of republican liberty. Renaissance values in the age of the Counter
Reformation (Berkeley, 1968), pp. 135-167, offers a useful overview. More generally, on
Venetian culture of this period, see G.Arnaldi and M.Pastore Stocchi (eds.) 1980, vol.
III, 'Dal primo quattrocento al concilio di Trento'. On travel literature, M.Zancan
'Venezia e il Veneto' in Letteratura Italiana. Storia e Geografia, II (Torino, 1988), pp. 624657, although it is too often derivative. On the economic and political context,
V.Magalhes Godinho, 'Venise: les dimensions d'une presence face un monde
tellement chang , XVe-XVe sicles', in H. -G.Beck, M.Manoussacas and A.Pertusi
(eds.) Venezia centro di mediazione tra Oriente e Occidente (secoli XV-XVI) (Firenze, 1977),
I, pp. 11-50.

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25. For the Venetian relations to the senate see the Relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti al
senato edited by A.Segarizzi (three vols. in four, Bari, 1912-16. From this A.Ventura
published a valuable anthology in 1980). Some Florentine examples of embassy
journals range from Giovanni di Tommaso Ridolfi, who accompanied his father to
northern Italy in 1480 (see P.J. Jones, 'Travel notes of an apprentice Florentine
statesman...' in P. Denley and C.Elam (eds.) Florence and Italy. Renaissance studies in
honour of Nicolai Rubinstein, London 1988, pp. 263-280) to the better known relation of
Francesco Guicciardini in Spain in 1512-13. Still in Italy, a different case is represented
by Antonio de Beatis, who accompanied Cardinal Luigi d'Aragona across the Alps in
1517-18 (see Hale 1979). From the same years, but in an altogether different genre, is
the fascinating account of a journey through Europe written by an anonymous
Milanese merchant in 1517-19 (see L.Monga, Un mercante di Milano in Europa. Diario di
viaggio del primo Cinquecento, Milano 1985).
26. For this see Stagl 1990.
27. English instructions for travellers have been studied by C.Howard, English travellers of
the Renaissance (New York, 1914). This author provides the fundamental references
and arguments to understand the introduction of the genre from Germany to
England, albeit her analysis of the texts is rather superficial. I have therefore
attempted to widen the perspective in which the cultural development took place,
while at the same time proposing to study the contents of some of the most original
treatises closely and systematically. Both Turlerus and Meierus are also briefly
discussed in J.Haynes The humanist as traveller. George Sandys' 'Relation of a journey

begun A.Dom. 1610' (London and Toronto, 1986). Haynes' excellent analysis of George
Sandys' account of his travels in Eastern Mediterranean (1615) includes a chapter on
the development of travel literature in Renaissance England. Although he explains
that there was a cultural debate on the benefits and dangers of travel, his treatment of
these treatises is however superficial. It is true that in Turlerus travelling is linked
with usefulness (pp. 33-34), but this has interesting implications other than he is
pedantic and "no fun to read". Some observations on methods for travel are also
contained in E.G.R. Taylor, Late Tudor and Early Stuart Geography, 1583-1650 (London,

1934) - an essential reference tool for the geographical literature of Elizabethan and
early Stuart England.
28. See Stagl 1990. However, the relationship between Neoplatonic Philosophy and
methodical science in the sixteenth century should not be taken for granted and needs
to be defined more precisely, with reference to specific authors and genres. This is
however not seperate from the need to relate science and religion in the same period.
29. One might for instance consider narratives such as Marco Polo's rather exceptional
Divisament dou monde. I discuss this theme in detail in a forthcoming book on
travellers to India between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries.
30. The early modern European "epistemological break" has been better studied by
historians of science and philosophy, especially in relationship with Bacon, Descartes,
Ramus and Galileo. See for instance A.Rupert Hall, The revolution in science 1500-1750
(London, 1962), especially chs. 1-3 and 7. From the perspective of the history of
culture see W.Ong (1958) N.Gilbert (1960), P.O. Kristeller, Renaissance thought (New
York, 1961), and J.H.Randall, The school of Padua and the emergence of modern science

(Padua, 1961), all of which devote attention to the Aristotelian tradition in the
sixteenth century and the problem of method. R.H.Popkin, The history of scepticism
from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley, 1979) focuses on the revival of scepticism, a parallel
question. Cassirer, Kristeller and Randall (eds.) The Renaissance philosophy of man
(Chicago, 1948) provide an important anthology on humanist ideas of man.
Important modern evaluations of western culture are based on more-or-less accurate

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31.

32.
33.

34.

183

historical analysis of this wide and complex change. See for instance M.Foucault, Les
mots et les choses (Paris, 1966), and from the perspective of the history of ideas Ch.
Taylor, Sources of the self (Cambridge, 1989).
These early publications all have obscure origins and questions of authorship remain
unsettled, although by now various sensible hypotheses have been proposed. It
seems, for instance, that Scyllacius adapted a letter by his friend the Catalan doctor
Guillem Coma, one of whose informants was Margarit, a leading dissenter from
Columbus' colonial adventure. It is also likely that Vespucci's letters were adapted in
order to produce the Mundus Novus, although it is not so clear whether Vespucci
himself engineered this. See, respectively, J.Gil and C.Varela (eds.) , Cartas de
particulares a Coln y relaciones coetneas (Madrid, 1984), pp.177-203 and M.Pozzi (ed.)
Il mondo novo di Amerigo Vespucci (Torino, 1993) pp. 7-29.
A general survey of Renaissance travel collections can be found in D.F.Lach, Asia in
the making of Europe, vol. I 'A century of discovery' (Chicago, 1965), pp.204-217.
Of course, in the sixteenth century the ideological connotations of patriotic feelings
were different from those derived from the modern concept of nation-state, because
allegiance to a prince often took precedence over other considerations, and it could
not be taken for granted that ultimately there was a single source of public authority
devoted to the exclusive interests of a political community. Still, the idea of the
nation as a community of people identified by a language, customs and laws,
organised as a political body, and settled in a particular territory that was supposed
to convey a special "nature" to its inhabitants, was very much prevalent. It can be
traced to the fifteenth century at least, and was usually associated with a historical
rhetoric.
The role of travelling as an activity that expressed the changes experienced by the
European aristocracy must be followed in specialised literature. See A.Maczak, Viaggi
e voaggiatori nell 'Europe moderna (Roma, 1994; the original Polish edition is from 1978;
there is also a recent English edition). This book is useful and has a good
bibliography, although its approach is sometimes superficial. For England, the focus
of this work, the literature is more extensive. See Howard (1914) and Haynes (1986).
J.W.Stoye, English travellers abroad, 1606-1667 (London, 1952) is very usefull but only
deals with the seventeenth century. For Italy in special see G.B.Parks, The English
traveler to Italy The Middle Ages (to 1525) (Roma, 1954) and R.S. Pine-Coffin,
Bibliography of British and American travel in Italy to 1860 (Firenze, 1974). L.Stone, The
crisis of the aristocracy 1558-1641 (Oxford, 1965) gives a wide-ranging account of the
evolution of the English lite in this crucial period, discussing also the educational
importance of travel (pp.692-702), while the background of education in Elizabethan
England is generally discussed by the same author in 'The educational revolution in
England, 1560-1640', Past and Present 28 (1964). Here Stone developed a quantitative
approach previously initiated by Hexter and Curtis. Although he tentatively mapped
an expansive trend in education between 1570 and 1630, the fixation with
understanding the causes of the revolution of the 1640s led him to emphasize the
secularization of education at the institutional level, a process 'made possible by the
overthrow of the ancient clerical monopoly of culture'. This analysis missed the
qualitative importance of the idea of a world-wise, practical courtier, that is, the
informal connection between formal education and politics. This was effectively done
by Fritz Caspari in his Humanism and the social order in Tudor England (1968), and by

Denys Hay in his 'Renaissance education and the governors' (repr. in Renaissance
essays, 1988, pp.389-396). Working on the actual contents of the educational literature,
these authors rightly emphasized the influence of humanism and its adaptation to
local political conditions. However, the role of travel is not sufficiently addressed in
any of these works.

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35. Lasseis was a rather exceptional representative of the Grand Tour given his Catholic
leanings, but his treatise marks nevertheless an important stage in a genre that stood
in the end above confessional differences. New light on the evolution of his work
between 1637 and 1668 is contained in E.Chaney, The grand tour and the great rebellion.
Richard Lassels and 'The voyage of Italy' in the seventeenth century (Geneve, 1985).
36. It would be rather pointless to give here a full bibliography on the expansion of
Europe. I shall briefly refer to a few general works. J.H.Parry, The Age of
Reconnaissance (2nd ed. California, 1981) and G.V.Scammell, The world encompassed.
The first European maritime empires c.800-1650 (London, 1981) are useful introductions.
The Portuguese empire is covered by C.R. Boxer The Portuguese seaborne empire,
B.Diffie and G.Winius, Foundation of the Portuguese empire (Oxford, 1977) a n d , for
some finer points, S.Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese empire in Asia 1500-1700 (London
and New York, 1993). For Spain in America L.Bethell (ed.) The Cambridge History of
Latin America, vols. I and II (Cambridge, 1978) is a valuable starting point, although
for the metropolitan perspective J.Lynch, Spain under the Habsburgs (II vols. Oxford,
1964-9) is more adequate (it has recently been reissued with important revisions as
consecutive volumes of 'A history of Spain' edited by the same author, Oxford 1992).
On the growing world-economy see I.Wallerstein The Modern world-system, vol. I
(Orlando, 1974). For a recent comparative perspective on merchant empires, see the
two volumes edited by J.D.Tracy, The rise of merchant empires (Cambridge,1990) and
The political economy of merchant empires (Cambridge,1991). The early English
expansion overseas is well covered in K.R.Andrews, Trade, plunder and settlement
(Cambridge, 1984), while for the Dutch see J.I.Israel, Dutch primacy in world trade,
1585-1740 (Oxford, 1989).
37. See H.Cline, 'The "Relaciones Geogrficas" of the Spanish Indies, 1577-1586', in
Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 44, 3 (1964). For the wider context of imperial
science under Philip II, D.C.Goodman, Power and penury: government, technology and
science in Philip Il's Spain (Cambridge, 1988). Many of the geographical relations
prepared in America were published in Spain by Jimnez de la Espada in the
nineteenth century, and others have appeared since.
38. However, the initiative seems to have had an influence beyond the production of
standard geographical relations. J.S.Cummins thinks that an account as important as
Antonio de Morga's Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas (Mexico 1609) was influenced by the
questionnaire. See Antonio de Morga, Sucesos de las Islas Pilipinas, translated and
edited by J.S Cummins (Cambridge, 1971), p. 26. More obvious is the case of Juan de
Pomar's relation of Mexico, where the questionnaire sent by the crown legitimized
polemical research into pre-hispanic history by a mestizo from Tetzcoco. It is
published in J.Garca Icazbalceta, Nueva coleccin de documentos para la historia de
Mxico, vol. III (Mxico, 1891), pp. 1-69.
39. There were a few exceptions to this rule, because some Catholic universities (Bologna,
Naples, Louvain) were considered "safe" for Spaniards, but the overall restriction
was harsh and, given the international movement of ideas, of great consequence. Two
generations later, the minister Olivares complained that he did not find the thinking
men he needed to serve the state. This was paradoxical, because the very
international nature of the Habsburg monarchy offered an excellent basis for a
cosmopolitan foreign service - the problem was purely educational. In England,
instead, despite the existence of restrictions over foreign travel during the reign of
Elizabeth, Lawrence Stone calculates that between 1570 and 1639 about 65 peers are
known to have spent two or three years travelling in the continent 'and the true
number is probably near 80 or more'. See Stone (1965), p. 702.

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40. For the Portuguese policy of secrecy see Lach (1965) I, pp. 150-4. Lach's claim that
there was a systematic restriction of the flow of information is probably too general,
since it is not clear that the circulation of chronicles and descriptions was always
actively prevented by the crown. On the other hand, the tendency to regard certain
kinds of information as a political asset which needed to be controlled was clear,
while the fact that many reports were only used within restricted circles was perfectly consistent with the aims of those who wrote or commissioned them. The effects
of religious and political censorship, as well as the rather limited possibilities of the
book market in Portugal, had also a considerable effect and help explain that
chronicles and stories written for a wide public were not easy to publish. Overall,
significant parts of the Portuguese literature of expansion failed to take off as a public
genre in their home country (but this is also true of much that was written in Castilian
and in Italian).
41. The figure of Giovanni Ramusio as a humanist is well established in Marica
Milanesi's introduction to the Navigazioni e viaggi (1978). See also G.B.Parks, 'The
contents and sources of Ramusio's Navigationi', Bulletin of the New York public library
59, 6 (1955): 279-313 for his use of sources, and G.Luchetta, 'Viaggiatori e racconti di
viaggi nel Cinquecento', in Arnaldi and Pastore-Stocchi eds. (1980) pp. 433-489 for the
Venetian tradition of travel collections.
42. See Filippo Sassetti, Lettere di vari paesi ed. V.Bramanti (Milano, 1970) p.17.
43. On Eden see the article by E.Arber in Dictionary of National Biography (hereafter DNB).
On Hakluyt see, in the first place, G.B.Parks, Richard Hakluyt and the English voyages
(New York, 1928), and the introduction to E.G.R.Taylor (ed.) The original writings and
correspondence of the two Richard Hakluyts II vols.(London, 1935). The latter work offers
an excellent edition of documents and contains the best evidence of what the two
Richard Hakluyts (the editor and his elder cousin, who was involved in similar
activities) thought about overseas expansion. See also 'A Hakluyt perspective' in
D.B.Quinn (ed.) The Hakluyt handbook, II vols. (London, 1974). For Hakluyt's
nationalist ideology and its importance in the expansion of Europe, see Andrews
(1984), pp. 33-7.
44. Letter from Francis Walsingham to Richard Hakluyt (11 March 1582) in Taylor ed.
(1935) II, p.197.
45. The text has been carefully published in modern times. See ibid, pp.211-326.
46. I quote following Taylor (1935), who publishes the prefaces and dedications in
pp.396-409 (for the edition of 1589), 426-451 (for the edition of 1598-1600, vol.I), 453463 (vol.II) and 469-475 (vol.III).
47. Ibid. p.396.
48. Ibid p.399.
49. Ibid. p.402.
50. Ibid.
51. By popular I refer to the relatively large quantity of readers, not to a social class, since
these books were published both in Latin and German. De Bry's multilingual edition
of Thomas Harriot's Brief and true report of the new-found land of Virginia in 1590, with

English and French editions as well as German and Latin, was a rather unique case
motivated by the direct intervention of Hakluyt, who from Paris was able to offer the
report by Harriot (published in London in 1588) and the drawings of John White to
the German publisher. The fact that Harriot was himself a specialist in mathematical
and astronomical science provides incidental evidence, if more be needed, of the
connection between ethnological and natural observations at this period. Travelling
to America to discover new lands and looking through a telescope were associated
noy only metaphorically, but also as part of an encyclopedic and methodological
enterprise.

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52. Subsequently I will refer to Meierus and Turlerus (these are the names they employed
for their Latin publications) by their anglicised names, Meier and Turler, which
correspond better to the context of reception of their works with which we are
concerned.
53. For the sixteenth century I have only been able to locate a Petit discours de l'utilit des
voyages ou pelegrinages by E.Margriau (Paris 1578). For the seventeenth century there
are, besides the important collection of travels by Thvenot, the discourse on travel
that prefaced one the later editions of the voyage of Franois Pyrard de Laval in the
Oriental Indies (1679), and De l'utilit des voyages et de l'avantage que la recherche des
antiquits procure aux savants by Baudelot de Darval (1686). On French geographical
literature of the sixteenth century see G.Atkinson, La littrature gographique franaise
de la Renaissance (Paris, 1927) and Les nouvaux horizons de la Renaissance franaise (Paris,
1935). For the intellectual history of cosmography and travel in the same period see
the various works by Frank Lestringant, for instance his L'atelier du cosmographe, ou
l'image du monde la Renaissance (Paris, 1991). And on the importance of travel as an
educational experience in the early seventeenth century, despite the lack of an explicit
discourse, one may use Ren Pintard's study of the 'erudite libertins' whose eventual
intellectual regression into conformity he deplores: Le libertinage rudit dans la premire
moiti du XVII sicle, II vols. (Paris, 1943),
54. A useful reference guide to several works classifiable as instructions for travellers that
were printed in England can be found in E.G.Cox, A reference guide to the literature of
travel III vols. (Seattle, 1935-49) -see vol. 2. Also useful, although less comprehensive,
is Pine-Coffin (1974).
55. It has been reprinted by F.J.Furnivall (ed.) Andrew Borde's introduction and dyetary
(London, 1870). On Borde's life see DNB II, pp. 833-5.
56. See Wilson (1553) ff. 16-17. There are two recent editions of this work, one by
Th.J.Derrick with a valuable introduction analysing Wilson's sources (1982) and
another by P.E.Medine, based on the version of 1560 (1994). Derrick defines the Arte
as 'the first comprehensive rhetorical treatise in England and also the most popular
work of this kind in sixteenth-century England' (Derrick ed. 1982, p.lxiii). On
Wilson's career see also the entry in DNB.
57. Hermannus Kirchnerus' Oration of travel in generall was translated by Thomas Coryat
and included in his encyclopedic Crudities (1611). Kirchner was a civil lawyer and
rhetorician in the University of Marburg, and quite obviously a direct successor of
Turler.
58. Wilson's career, important in its own terms, was also symptomatic of wider patterns.
On English secretaries in Italy see K.R.Bartlett, 'Italian theory and English practice in
the Tudor state', in D.Letocha (ed.) Aequitas, Aequalitas, Auctoritas. Raison theorique et
legitimation de l'autorit dans le XVI sicle Europen (Vrin, 1992).
59. R.Ascham, The scholemaster (London, 1570) pp. 23-30.
60. See Furi Ceriol (in Mchoulan ed. 1973), pp.140-4 and, in Blundeville's version (Selig
ed. 1963) pp.67-73.
61. On Furi Ceriol see Mchoulan ed. (1973) and, for his later years, R.W.Truman,
'Fadrique Furi Ceriol's return to Spain from the Netherlands in 1564: further
information on its circumstances', in Bibliothque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 41, 2
(1979). I shall discuss Furi Ceriol's relationship with Jerome Turler and his moral
ideas in a following chapter.
62. The contents of these texts will be discussed with reference to the contexts for the
English translations in the continuation of this work.
63. Stone (1965), p.693. Edward (1549-87) was the third Earl of Rutland.

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187

64. See the letter attributed to Robert Devereux in Davison, Sidney and Essex (1633), a
small collection which also includes a version of one of Sidney's two letters to his
brother Robert (1579-80) and a brief advice attributed to secretary William Davison.
Cox 1935-49 (I,pp 320-2) is alone in thinking that there was an earlier edition in 1613.
Anyhow the texts printed in 1633 were all written before the end of the sixteenth
century, excepting the introduction by a certain B.F., which I believe may have been
written by Francis Bacon. See also Fulke Greville, Certaine learned and elegant workes...
(London, 1933), pp. 295-8. The close relationship between letters written by Essex,
Bacon, Fulke Greville and, only a few years earlier, Sidney, is beyond doubt, not just
at the level of friendship and exchange, but also at the more ticklish level of
authorship. See N.K.Farmer, 'Fulke Greville's letter to a cousin in France and the
problem of authorship in cases of formula writing', in Renaissance Quarterly 22, 2
(1969): 140-147.
65. It seems that both The view of France as it stoode in the yeare of our lord 1598 and the
Survey of the Great Dukes state of Tuscany in the yeare of our lord 1596 were first
published without Dallington's permission, in 1604 and 1605 respectively, although
the editor of the Survey, Edward Blount, declared his friendship to the author. The
publication of the two treatises is an example of how the products from a private
sphere of aristocratic education served as basis for a public cultural sphere, often
mediated by active printers like Blount himself.
66. Dallington's surveys had already been noted by Taylor (1934), pp.39-41, as
representative examples of 'regional geography or chorography'.
67. Palmer (1606), 'To the reader'.
68. Ibid. pp. 60-81.
69. Johnson trans. (1616), pp. 1-20 and 21-33.
70. Fynes Morison, An itinerary, containing his ten years' travel IV vols (Glasgow, 1907-8),
part III pp. 349 ff. This modern edition, based on the original but incomplete
publication of 1617, needs to be complemented with the manuscripts published by
Ch. Hughes with the title Shakespeare's Europe (London, 1904).
71. Mentioned by Maczak (1994), p.232. The manuscript is now preserved at Illinois
University Library.
72. The Earl of Leicester, Robert Dudley, was a key patron as well as a key politician in
Elizabeth's court until his death in 1588, and sponsored the activities of men like
Blundeville and Wilson as well as supporting Philip Sidney. Around 1600 the young
Earls of Essex, Bedford and Rutland were Robert Devereux, Edward Russell and
Roger Manners. The multi-formed letter on travel attributed to Essex was published
in 1633, and probably had been composed with the collaboration of Francis Bacon
more than thirty years earlier and possibly from a previous model. In some of the
manuscripts studied by J.Spedding for his edition of the Works of Francis Bacon (XIV
vols. London, 1857-4, II, pp.3-20) this letter was addressed by Essex to the Earl of
Rutland, logically Francis Manners who travelled to France in 1595, although this
may be only the result of a confusion with a previous letter of Lord Burghley
(William Cecil) to Edward, a former Earl of Rutland, written in 1571 (Stone 1965,
p.693). Lipsius' letter to the young nobleman Philip Lanoy was translated by Sir John
Stradling for the Earl of Bedford. Dallington's method was originally intended for the
private use of the sixth Earl of Rutland, Francis Manners. Philip Sidney's career and
influence are well known, as are Ralegh's activities as courtier, privateer and colonist,
or his support for Thomas Harriot.
73. Some names in this list have not been discussed in the text and need some
justification. For instance Harvey did not actually write or translate any method for
travellers, but he was a keen collector of these, and we have the marginalia to his

188

74.

75.
76.
77.
78.

79.
80.
81.
82.

JOAN-PAU RUBIES
Turler. Of course his interest in travel was related to his activities as a Cambridge
educator and rhetorician, who, above everything else, hoped to educate himself
further. The theme kept coming up through his friendship with Thomas Wilson, in
his satires of 'Italianated Englishmen' and in his polemic with Thomas Nashe, whose
narrative prose the Unfortunate traveller (1594) can be read as both exploration and
satire of the literary possibilities of the figure of the traveller to Italy. On Harvey's
role as "facilitator" see Grafton and Jardine, '"studied for action": How Gabriel
Harvey read his Livy' in Past and Present no 129 (1990): 30-78. On his understanding
of dialectics see Lisa Jardine, 'Humanism and dialectic in sixteenth-century
Cambridge: a preliminary investigation' in Bolgar (ed.) 1974, pp. 141-154.
The underlying unity of intention among the different court factions during the reign
of Elizabeth (led by Leicester, Walsingham, the Sidneys, Raleigh, Essex and the CecilBurghleys) has been stressed by John Guy in his Tudor England (Oxford, 1988), p. 255.
Indeed, while William Cecil's more cautious and perhaps self-seeking approach to
foreign policy has often been opposed to the Protestant "activism" of Walsingham,
Leicester and Sidney in the 1570s and 1580s, and their respective positions inherited
by Robert Cecil and the second Earl of Essex in the 1590s, these groups did not
represent two opposing principles as much as shades within a common position in
which the defence of Protestantism, an anti-Spanish continental strategy, and support
for colonial ventures were all active ingredients. It would not be fair to see all
humanistic cultural patronage coming from the same faction either. The literature on
Elizabethan England is of course vast. Guy's book is a good starting point for an
analysis of Elizabethan government and politics, and includes a detailed
bibliography. For cultural aspects one needs to refer to more specialised works. For
the early seventeenth century, K. Sharpe and P.Lake (eds.) Culture and politics in early
Stuart England (London, 1994) includes many valuable articles.
See Coryat's extravagant Crudities (1611) or his Travailer for the English wits (1616), a
letter sent to his countrymen from India. For George Sandys see Haynes (1986) and,
for Moryson, Hughes ed. (1904).
Peacham (1622), p. 200.
The social transformation of the English aristocracy is described in Stone (1965).
The general pattern of English economic expansion and its trade overseas is discussed
in Scammell (1981), pp.458-500. See also Andrews (1984) and, for the East India
Company, K.N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: the study of an early jointstock company (London, 1965).
On the origins of the "Grand Tour" see Stoye (1952) and C. di Seta, 'Italia nello
specchio del " Grand Tour"', in C.di Seta ed. II paesaggio, vol. V of 'Annali di Storia d'
Italia' (Torino, 1982).
On the other hand, as is often remarked, Purchas abandoned Hakluyt's careful
editorial methods. On Purchas see Taylor 1934, pp. 53-66 and W.Foster "Samuel
Purchas' in E. Lynam (ed.) Richard Hakluyt and his successors (London, 1946).
On navigational literature see Andrews (1984), pp.29-30. There is a modern edition of
William Bourne's A regiment for the sea edited by E.G.R.Taylor (Cambridge, 1963).
For England and the mathematical sciences see the exhibition catalogue by
S.A.Johnston, F.H.Willmoth and J.A.Bennett, The grounde of all artes. Mathematical
books of 16th-Century England, (Whipple Museum of the history of science, Cambridge,
1985), which discusses a good number of the most important titles published in this
period; for a more general perspective see D.W.Waters, 'Science and the techniques of
navigation in the Renaissance', in C.Singleton (ed.) Art, science and history in the
Renaissance (Baltimore, 1967); also D.Howse, 'Navigation and Astronomy: the first
three thousand years' in Renaissance and Modern Studies, Nottingham (1986): 60-86. For

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189

the nobility's involment in commercial activities, Stone (1965), pp. 363-84 is valuable,
because it distinguishes quantitative and qualitative aspects. I owe to Will Sherman's
forthcoming monograph my better understanding of the role of John Dee.
83. See Farmer 1969 and nn. 64 and 72 above. The three letters attributed to Bacon are
published in Bacon (Spedding ed.) 1861-72, II, 3-20. I shall call the first letter "first
Essex letter". It was printed in 1633 (profitable instructions...), along with Sidney's 1579
letter to his brother on the same subject, and secretary Davison's instructions (see
Devereux et al. 1633). For Sidney's letter to his brother one must also compare a letter
sent to Sidney by the humanist Hubert Languet in December 1573. Davison's
instructions, which he probably wrote for his son Francis when he travelled in Europe
inl594, are similar to the third letter published by Spedding, a standard "dialectical
method" on what to observe intended to complement the generalities of the first
letter - which focuses on moral advice - and the specific advice on a course of study of
a second letter, which is more like a reading-list. This second letter is similar in nature
to a second letter of Philip Sidney to his brother Robert of 1580, and is printed in the
fourth place by Spedding (ibid. pp. 21-6) as addressed by Essex to Fulke Greville
when he was in Cambridge. On the other hand, the second "Essex letter" given by
Spedding as sent to the Earl of Rutland is in fact very similar to Fulke Greville's letter
to his cousin Greville Varney in 1609, and published among his works in 1633. It is
also very similar to another latter possibly sent by Thomas Bodleigh to Francis Bacon
c. 1576, and to the letter sent by Lord Burghley (William Cecil) to the Earl of Rutland
in 1571. In other words, this letter to a young gentleman travelling to France was used
throughout the 1570s and all the way to 1633, when it was printed as Fulke Greville's!
The letter mostly emphasized that the traveller should learn about the world without
losing his religion, and linked the profitable with the honest. It encouraged learning
from foreigners rather than mocking them, provided it was all done with a clear
moral attitude, and went on to provide a summary of things to be observed, although
without intending to bring 'all your observations to heads' (that is, it was not a
proper method). Possibly the extraordinary success of this letter, which is neither the
most original nor the most profound, can be related to its combining conventional
moral advice with superficial dialectical guidelines. To summarize, we have four
basic English documents printed in 1633: (1) The first "Essex" letter of moral advice,
in whose composition Bacon may have participated; (2) Philip Sidney's first letter to
Robert Sidney; (3) Secretary Davison's method for observation, which resembles a
manuscript which might be from Francis Bacon; and seperately (4) Fulke Greville's
plagiarised letter, which was originally sent to the Earl of Rutland, at some later point
sent to Bacon, and at another point attributed to the Earl of Essex. There were,
furthermore, the "reading lists" by Philip to Robert Sidney when travelling aboad,
and by the Earl of Essex to Fulke Greville when studying in Cambridge.
84. The Defence of poesy was essentially a rhetorical oration. William Temple, Sidney's
secretary, composed a methodical analysis of the Defence. See J.Webster (ed.) William
Temple's analysis of Sir Philip Sidney's Apology for poetry (New York, 1984).
85. Davison, Essex and Sidney (1633), p.33.
86. Ibid. pp. 40-1.
87. Ibid. pp. 64-5.
88. As noted by J.Spedding in Bacon (1861-72), II, p.4. He also identifies parallels with the
essay "Of travel". On the other hand, his attribution of the three "Essex" letters he
publishes to Bacon is unsatisfactory, according to my discussion above.
89. For instance, the 'Directions about what is to be observed in foreign states by those
who travel', mentioned in ibid. p.3.

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90. 'as the doctrine of syllogisms comprehendeth the rules of judgement upon that which
is invented, so the doctrine of method containeth the rules of judgement upon that
which is to be delivered'. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning and the New
Atlantis, ed. by A.Johnson (Oxford, 1974), p.134.
91. Ibid.
92. Ibid. pp.137-8.
93. Robert Boyle had also set out 'General heads for a natural history of a country' in
1665 (in the first number of the Transactions of the Royal Society).

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