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History and Anthropology, 1996 © 1996 OPA (Overseas Pub lishers Association)
Vol. 9, Nos. 2-3 , pp . 139-190 Am sterdam B.V. Published in The Netherlan ds
Photocopy ing permitted by license only by Harw ood Academic Publishers Gm bH
Printed in Malaysia
INSTRUCTIONS FOR TRAVELLERS:
TEACHING TH E EYE TO SEE
Joan Pau Rubiés
University of eading
'Many countries it is good to see
preserving still our hon estie'
(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
w ith a clear analysis of th e scientific relevan ce of
travel literature. He began by recognising the distance that separated the
ancient and m od ern sciences 'of the par ts of the w orl d' , 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 r ight
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 ne w k ind of science formed the core of a new institutional rhetoric, but
w as m o r e t h an m er e r h e to r i c : i t a l s o r e s p o n d ed to t h e o n g o in g
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
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140 JOAN-PAU RUBIES
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 an d questions ab out relativism and hierarchy are only pa rt 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
proce dure '). M ethods for travellers were in fact a genre throug h which a
new intellectual elite sought to teach Europ eans h ow to see the w orld.
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 d ocu m ent'. Knox had b een assisted in ordering his notes and
writing 'methodically' by his cousin John Strype, who was a minister, so
tha t when Hooke desc r ibed the con ten t s o f t he book he mere ly
summarised the existing headings, suggesting that more could have been
written about the subject. A nd yet the 'm eth od ' already implicit in the
discourse corresponded closely with a plausible list of instructions for
travellers: First came a physical and hu m an geogra phy of the island, w ith
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
governm ent 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 qual i t ies ' , 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 w as su ppo sed 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
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INSTRUCTIONS FOR TRAV ELLERS 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
proposa ls for co l lec t ing and publ i sh ing t rave l le r ' s accounts wi th
me thodical criteria followed well-know n m odels 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 b oun daries 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
hu m an 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 hum an 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
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142 JOAN-PAU RUBIES
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 sixteenth-
century 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
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INSTRUCTIONS FOR TRAV ELLERS 143
Methodus ad facilem historiarutn cognitionem pub lished by Jean B odin 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 qui te
d i f fe ren t f rom a ny w ho les a le re jec t ion of A ris to t le or un iv er s i ty
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 polit ical discourse, introduced the polemical use of philological
criticism, and in some cases also involved an imaginative emphasis on
Neoplatonic syncret ism to which both Aristot le and the Bible were
subjected. But at the same time Aristotle remained central to dialectics
and na tura l science, and som e of the greatest critics of useless A ristotelian
logic (like Juan-Luis Vives) were also the defenders of what they saw as
Aristotle 's genuine posit ion, for instance his empirical and practice-
oriented bias.
Crucially, the Aristotle of those who read Greek and collated
manusc ripts w ith the skill of hum anists like Poliziano, w as 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 bo un d to reflect up on 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
an d dispositio were also the basis
fo r me thodo log ica l re f l ec t ions ) o r Qu in t i l i an ' s Institutio orator ia
(particularly appropriate as a model for humanist-educators concerned
with the public use of argument, and thus adopted by Lorenzo Valla,
Ru dolph A gricola a nd , later, by the Jesuit colleges). Aristotle's conception
of dialect ical 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 w ork and indeed the
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144 JOAN -PAU RUBIES
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 we re as importan t to politics, morality and
law as mathem atics w as to physics an d navig ation. In fact, it is difficult to
ima gine the con t r ibu t io ns of s ix tee n th -c en tu ry sc ien t i st s w i tho u t
reference to these basis disciplines in universities like Cambridge and
Pad ua, even thoug h m en like Bacon and Galileo may then have contested
the dogmatism of man y teachers.
There fo re , r a ther than the cance l la t ion o f one d i sc ip l ine o r
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 print ing press . For this reason, if one wanted to keep a
universal perspective in the midst of diversify and change (a concern
which wa s cer ta in ly im por tant in Ch r is t ian Europe) a m etho d w as
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
c l imat ic de te rmin ism tha t cou ld exp la in human d iver s i ty wi thou t
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 informat ion made avai lable through repor t ing , researching and
especial ly print ing in the course of the century. While the medieval
encyclopedist copied, plagiarised and added different sources so as to
m ake his work as com prehen sive as possible, in the late Renaissance there
wa s 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
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INSTRUCTIONS FOR TRAV ELLERS 145
The advancement of learning was, for this reason, s t ructured around
traditional 'errors ' that one needed to percieve and correct, while his new
inductive logic also worked arou nd 'idols' to be avoided).
This process implied the revision of the tradit ional categories of
classification provided by Aristotelian lists of topics, since they were felt
to be of little use. Thus the loci comm unes, in an tiquity mnem onic 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 re sults 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'
t h rough th i s k ind o f d i sp lay . The t rees were o f t en p r in t ed , 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
l eve l l ing ' o f a l l sou rces o f Greek me thodo logy ' t o 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. M ore indirectly, the w idesprea d and graphic use of
the loci communes and d ispu tes about how they sho uld be organised
entailed a reflection on the linguistic categories of thought. Needless to
say, informed criticism of ancient authorities and reflection on analytical
m ethods w ere both central to the development of a new attitude towards
knowledge and natural science. (For instance, the controversy Ramus
raised in Cam bridge w as also in the backgro und of Bacon's proposals).
Above a l l , Renaissance methods ac tua l ly worked by address ing
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
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146 JOAN-PA U RUBIES
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 re jec t ' common places ' of v i r tues and v ices , or th ings
commendable and not commendable, as far too s imple, and instead
suggested 'other places also besydes them , meete to be applye d 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 under-
stood, 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 comm onw ealth.
Blundeville's treatise was partly based on Francesco Patrizi's typically
humanis t d ia logues , but he a lso t rans la ted a t rea t ise by h is f r iend
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 p resen t a
method more complete than Ramus's. Blundeville considered Aconzio's
logical m etho d supe rior because it did n ot 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
'hidd en ' possibilities. Aconzio's tw o treatises, taken as a w ho le, 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
w ere also used as a way of organising new encyclopedias, in a
long- term depar ture which according to Wal ter Ong ref lec ted the
transition from the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages (which had
insisted on the selective preservation of knowledge) to one dominated by
the prin ting press. This use of the
loci
in many ways prom oted a ' textual
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INSTRUCTIONS FOR TRAV ELLERS 147
particular contribution was therefore part of a long-term transformation
which pre -dated him and w as 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 w ith pu tting toge ther 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 ackn ow ledge d as a prec ede nt the 1504 Commentariorum
urbanorum of Raffaello Volterrano, an early Italian c osm og raph er w ho
was himself the inheritor of Pius II, humanist-pope and traveller. With
Pius II (1405-64) we reach a kind of humanist start ing-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 mode l which Bodin
would sustain a century later in his Methodus. It was also as natural
histories, thoug h conceived as better informed than P liny's, that the m ost
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 Co llecting
The practice of travel writing, certainly one of the conspicuous
developm ents of the culture of the Renaissance, generated a fundam ental
set of genres which contributed powerfully to the multiplication of
obse rva t ions o f va r ious k inds (cover ing bo th human and na tu ra l
sunjects). This practice was not only a pre-conditon for the cumulation of
a 'pool ' of novel empirical data, i t 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 n oblem an, as opp osed to
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148 JOAN-PA U RUBIES
Despite various medieval precedents, a change both quantitative and
qualitative in the practice of travel-writing becom es appa rent b etwee n 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 w orld '. Qu estioning the direct influence of m edieval travelog ues
such as Marco Polo's, Hale ackno wledges several traditions wh ich offered
models for individuals recording their travel experience: barely literary
act ivi t ies such as la te-medieval compilat ions of l is ts , geographical
i t i ne ra r i e s and house ho ld a cco un t s , bu t a l so m ore s oph i s t i ca t ed
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 Sigol i and Giorg io Gucci recorded many
observations in 1384 about particular customs and situations which a
twel f th-century predecessor would have neglec ted to inc lude in a
religious nar rativ e, and by 1524 Francesco Surian o could pub lish an
account of pi lgrimage in the form of a dialogue in which natural-
historical inform ation occup ied a full second par t .) Th us 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
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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
know ledge d erived from his own experience as traveller to the often vain
cosmological specu lations of university scho lars. His book, full of first-
hand 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 l i terary history that went from chivalric and religious
literature, through humanist appropriations of the figure of Ulysses, to
discussions of the quali t ies 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 sett ings - 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
know ledge, but also a new model of virtue.
However, a l l th is rhetoric , just i f ied or not , was st i l l far from a
methodical training of mind s. This w ould only come from the interaction
between educational projects and practical needs. The Venetian case
i l lus t ra tes th i s , becau se the comm ercia l l earn ing s of it s pa t r ic ia te
determine not only the civic and unadventurous slant of its humanism,
but also and early engagement with oriental societies which provided a
uniq ue continuity from the M iddle Ages to the early mod ern perio d. 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 sam e time scientific, political and patriotic. Th us 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 publ i s he d in the 1550s. M ean w hi le , man y of thos e V enet ian
patricians educated by Pomponazzi in Padua were also engaged in a
highly regulated activity as writers of poli t ical reports (although, of
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150 JOAN-PA U RUBIES
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 head ings 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 abou t the lists of things to be observed in the 'm eth od s' for travellers.
Thus what could be described as a local tradition appropriate to the
peculiar con ditions of Venice soon became influential in a w ide r an d more
ambitious European context. The genre of 'instructions for travellers' was
chiefly init iated by a group of German humanists who, l ike Theodor
Zwinger, studied law or medicine at the university of Padua and were to
a degree inspired by Ramism. A lthough we mu st bew are exaggerating a
link wh ich w as by no m eans exclusive, these scholars seem to hav e 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 A ris to te l ian ism assoc ia ted w i th Pie tro Po m po naz zi a t 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 Em pire, bu t
the movement also had links with the Netherlands and eventually took
root in En gland. The tradit ion was therfore m ore pro m inen t 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
cent res of publ i sh ing such as Base l . Some of them, l ike 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 know ledge m et in a comp rehensive w orld-picture.
The d i sc uss io n of a m e th od im pl i ed tw o d i f fe ren t m ov es , t he
imposition of a principle of order on the information and the preference
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method for travel and for the description of foreign lands and peoples
seems to have been the result of a cum ulative 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 avai lable new
classical sources and thus provided the basis for a sophisticated lay
science and morality, the crisis of this religious consen sus (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
fo l lowed a pa t te r n which wa s to chara c ter i se the ep is tem ologica l
radicality of cultural discourses in modern Europe: the proper way to
a c q u i r e k n o wl e d g e wa n o l o n g e r t h e s p o n t a n e o u s a c c e p t a n c e o f
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. Thu s the educational practices of the hum anists did more
than offer new moral discourses: by insist ing on the definit ion 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, bu t also ma ny rulers w ho could no t prevent a
chal lenging wri ter from travel l ing elsewhere or a t least publ ishing
abroad. Paradoxically, the political and cultural fragmentation of Europe
was accompanied by new forms of communicat ion and dependance
which ensu red tha t t he common l anguage , t h rea t end by re l ig ious
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 centu ry tha t the great pub lished collections appear, as a result of
both the cumulation of sources and the grow ing interest in keeping all the
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Fernandes, w ho kept prospective German investors from N urem berg and
other cities well informed of the new voyages to the East. But w e 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 L isbon by the sam e Valentim Fern andes in 1502) or
the la test news about the new world, such as the le t ter 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 langu ages, expressing the early interaction
of the practical concerns of merchan ts and other investors with the m ore
rhetorical ones of the hu m anists.
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 novam ente retrovati, et novo
mondo da Alberico Vesputio Florentino intitulato (Vicenza, 1507), or th e 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
o f the p rac t i ca l men , t he economic in t e res t s o f p r in t e rs , and the
in te l lec tua l cur ios i ty of humanis t s . The Paesi, of ten rep r in te d and
translated, became a profitable editional enterprise dev ised to entertain as
well as inform the reader, from an awa reness of the contrast betw een 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 W est and East, show ed a tenden cy tow ards a universa l
view of the world (that is, a cosmo graphy) b ased on travel literature. The
fabulous is st i l l 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
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This is true even when, as in the case of the N ovus orbis, the e dition w as
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
purpo se. H ere all accounts deal w ith Venetian travels to the East, havin g a
double purpose: to provide information about the Portuguese t rade-
system in the Indian Ocean, and to encourage the Venetians to pursue
their business over there regardless of the app arent 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
Po rtugu se crow n to finance and participate in the oriental fleets from the
earl iest voyages, many of their le t ters never found way into print
(ma terials 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 col lect ions, especial ly that of Richard Hakluyt in
English, because they contributed to the creation of a body of quasi-
mythological 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 tow ards their contents w ere
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
mu c h mo re c o mmo n p h e n o me n o n . I t wa s n o t h o we v e r t h e me re
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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 human istic ideals of hu m an perfection and to the grow ing political role
p layed by noblemen as ambassadors and informers of pr inces and
republics. The treatises appeared therefore at the same time that the
p rac t i ce o f reco rd ing t rave l s ab road became genera l i sed , desp i t e
significant differences from country to country. They were however not
simply lists of topics designed to guide the w riting of travel journals, but
more generally, a philosophy of travel in which ethical ideals were
expressed.
The second s t imulus came from the evolu t ion of the European
expansion overseas. Here it m ust 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 Eu rop ean c ou n te rp a r t i n R icha rd L asse l s ' p re face
'conerning travel', which introduced his successful guide of the Grand
Tour, the Voyage of Italy pub lished pos thum ously 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 system s. For Po rtugal and Castile, perip hera l 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
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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 erod ed. To the extent that there w as a w orld-economy based
on trade, i ts beneficiar ies were less the Portuguese or the Casti l ian
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 Med iterranean , an d the English in the Altantic. It w as no t
only that there were capable competitors posing a threat, but also and
m ore significantly that the colonial systems ha d h ad regressive social and
economic effects in the Iberian peninsula, while the superficial unity
imposed by the crown on a se t of heterogeneous and increas ingly
divergent terr i tor ies fai led to provide the poli t ical system with any
coherence.This became evident when in 1580 Philip II of Castile united
the crowns of Spain and Portugal, bu t was u nable to coordinate their two
colonial empiries in a single system under his control. In the same way as
th e A m er i can s i l v e r p a s s ed t h r o u g h C as t i le w i th o u t m ak in g an y
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 posit ion of a reduced merchant class s t i l l 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 socio-
cul tura l background, which fos tered and a l ternat ive to t radi t ional
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 an d its expansion w ere evident mo tivations for the d evelopm ent 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 w ith information, and rel iable information, be cam e vital .
While there developed a common ground of techniques for collecting and
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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 comm unes of the
instructions for travellers. And yet the resu lting geographical relations,
or the royal cosmograph y devised by Juan Lopez d e 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
com mo nwealth. This restriction was in accordance not only w ith 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 w ay the patte rn of imp erial adm inistration 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 writ ten by humanist doctors and missionaries)
remained buried in Castilian royal archives, only to be partially recovered
by the historian Antonio de He rrera 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
Casti l ian and Portuguese chronicles and poems to Richard Hakluyt 's
Principall navigations. It was st i l l in the context of Iberian colonial
hegem ony that in 1550 the Venetian civil servant and hum anist Giovanni
Battista Ramusio published the first volume of his Delle navigationi et
viaggi, a serious attempt to compile, organise and provide a cri t ical
edit ion 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 w ith bring ing to light the
more valuable descript ions wri t ten by the early Portuguese in Asia
(especially those by Tome Pires and Duarte Barbosa), which had often
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vernacular too. This business dimension was of course missing from the
work of pro m inen t fifteenth-century hu m anis ts 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 pragm atic within that framework. And it w as mainly curiousity
for human moral diversi ty and the power Fortune that led Poggio
Bracciolini to interroga te N icolo C onti in 1441, a century before Ram usio
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
som etimes superiority, or their ow n age. The fact that hu man ists 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 aris tocrat ic system of government . Thus Ramusio 's humanism
combined a sense of duty tow ards the Republic he w as serving (as a high-
ranking 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).
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Of course Ramusion w as part of an erudite minority. Only a few am ong
his comtemporaries compared different sources and reflected upon them.
M any more merely knew w hat they found in pop ular 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 , r ich and monstrous in the
sixteenth century as in the M iddle A ges. The apoc hryp hal 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 crucia l for the development of la te 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 posthu m ously 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 l ike 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-humanis t Fil ippo Sassett i - t r ied to
recognize abroad what they had read in Ramusio 's volumes, jus t as
Co lum bus h ad relied on Marco Polo or Pius II w hen he found his Indies.
Methodical Travel and Methodical Science in the Engl ish
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 p articularly im po rtant u p u ntil the 1550s, w he n Philip II
b ro ug h t in a cha ng e of po l icy (Cas t i l i an -cen t red a nd re l ig io us ly
intolerant) that effectively severed many links and eventually led to the
revolt. Similarly, France w as an im porta nt stage in the selective reception
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These mediations involved important changes. Thus, the systematic
interest in scientific geograp hy a nd other natural ph enom ena that we find
in Ramusio was to a great extent abandoned in the English collections
a s s e m b l e d ^ E d e n
(1553,
1555 and 1577) and Hakluyt (1589 and
1598-1600). In bo th cases the explicit purp ose of the edito r's effort w as
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
Miins ter ' s
Cosmographia
(1544) and on th e lite ratu re of the Ca stilian
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 Venet ian ' s un iversa l i s t 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
fideli ty to the original documents, following humanist principles of
philological criticism and those methods of compilation developed first
by lawyers and historians.
In bo th cases the com pilations sh ou ld 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 w ith the technical assistance of Sebastan Cabot from the H ouse of
Trade {Casa de C ontratacion) at Sevi l le . His act ivi t ies 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
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north American routes, for his own private god and the 'publike benefit
of t h i s Re a lm e ' . The favour o f t he Q uee n , co nd uc t ive to s t ab le
prebendial benefits, was secured with the 'Discourse concerning western
discoveries' of 1584, an ideological and strategic blueprint for English
im per ialism in the A tlantic. A nd after the pub licatio n 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 read ers of both editions of
Richard H akluyt's Principall
Navigations
are v ery revea ling of his explicit
inten tions . So, in his ded ication to Sir Francis Wa lsingham of 1589
Hakluy t links his interest and curiosity for voyages an d 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, bu t also em pires, kingdo m s 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
In d i e s , t h e e s t a b l i s h me n t o f t r a d i n g c o mmu n i t i e s t h e re , a n d t h e
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 wh o saw in the discoveries an un deniab le progress
of know ledge, an d is aware th at there is still a lot to be explored. H e 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 w oon ders 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 cu r ren t knowledge , he dec ides to inves t iga t e and to compi l e
documentation so as to demonstrate that the English too have done well
overseas (and for this reason should feel encouraged to pursue the
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a n d k n i g h t s i n b a t t l e s a n d t o u rn a me n t s . Of c o u r s e t h i s o b v i o u s
relat ionship between feudal epics and nat ional expansion had been
previously exploited by the Castilians and the Po rtugues e, as for instance
Camoes '
Os Lusiades
clearly s how s. It is, how ever, im po rtan t 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 circum navigate the w orld.
Thus there is an epic identity which belongs to the nation and transcend s
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 tha t ex tends myster ious ly to the whole of the
communi ty regard less of c lass d i f fe rences and h is tor ica l changes .
Hakluyt's exaggerations express the ideal of an activity carried abroad, in
conf ron ta t ion w i th tha t w h ich is d i s t a n t and d i f fe ren t , w i th the
implication of breaking previous limits and attaining a kind of totality
exemplified by the idea of encompassing the wh ole w orld:
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 remo te parts of the world, so in this most famous an d pe erlesse
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
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162 JOAN-PAU RUBIES
action. He promised to give bibliographical references and to provide
translations of docum ents w ritten in a foreign langua ge, but retaining the
original as well. Therefore, w itho ut a ssum ing any exp licit task of criticism
and interpretation, Hakluyt referred the reliability of the contents of each
docum ent to the author ity of each 'personall traveller', so that 'every m an
might answere for himselfe, justifie his reports, and stand accountable for
his ow ne doing s'. This m ethod req uired the rejection of doc um ents 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
pa t r io t i sm combined the promise of deeds overseas wi th a ra ther
uncritical search for historical origins.
Hakluyt's respect for the reliability of the sources, that explains, for
instance, his rejection of Mandeville for th e second edition of his Principall
Navigations, w as clearly diminished in the case of the Ge rman series of
t rave l co l lec t ions in i t ia ted 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 G ryna eus'
Novus orbis
and Miinster's Cosmographia. Closely associated with highly imaginative
engravers, the printers of Frankfurt often sacrificed accuracy to the main
purp ose of selling books by ap pealing to the popu lar taste for the exotic.
The reliability of these books largely de pe nd ed 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
no t been cha l l enged by ea r l i e r ed i to rs , sugges t s t ha t 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 em pirical 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, Thom as H arriot or Fernao M endes P into m ay
or may not d i s tor t , invent and p lag iar i se accord ing to par t icu lar
situations, but none could afford to present his account as other than the
' true' expression of direct experience.
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INSTRUCTIONS FOR TRAV ELLERS 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 con-
sumption 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
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164 JOAN -PAU RUBIES
Descartes (the presentation of the latter's
Discourse
on M ethod 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 w as
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 importan t body of literature. A lthough there are a
few early preced ents, the process had a clear peak b etween 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 know ledg e, implicit in the way different trad itions
were combined under newly proc la imed purposes and idea ls . For
ins tance , 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
i r regu la r , and m ore am us ing than com preh ens ive ) . Th is k ind of
compendia of a l l sorts of useful information actual ly fol lowed the
medieval tradit ion of collections of moral doctrines and marvellous
na tu ra l phenomena . An en t i re ly sepa ra t e gen re were manua l s fo r
merchants such as The merchant's avizo of 1616 by a certain B.J., both
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INSTRUCTIONS FOR TRAVELLER S 165
However, what allowed the convergence of these different genres into a
more ambit ious discourse were the new educat ional 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 cont inental movement , an early discussion of the
advantages of t ravel was part of Thomas Wilson 's Arte of rhetorique
(1553).
56
W ilson'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 G erman hum anists such as Jerome Turler
and Hermann Kirchner
57
- and it may be not just a coincidence that bo th
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 m any years in Cam bridge
Wilson produced his English treatises on logic and rhetoric (The rule of
reason w as fi rs t pu bl i sh ed in 1551 and re pr in ted m an y t ime s) . A
Pr ote stan t , he w en t to I ta ly after 1553, exi led from Q ue en M ar y 's
persecutions but failed to avoid the Inquisition at Rome. After his return
in 1560 he became ambassador to Por tuga l , where he dea l t wi th
c o m m e rc i a l m a t t e r s a n d k e p t i m p o r t a n t l i n k s , a n d a f t e rw a rd s
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 con tinued, W ilson's friend Roger
Ascham included an early condemnation of travel, and in particular
travel to Italy, in his The scholemaster (1570), in w hich he ou tline d his
educat ional p rogramme.
59
Ancient Rome may have been a model of
civility to imitate, bu t contem porary Italy w as corrupt and dan gero us - 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 dominat ion of 'papist r ie ' . Announcing a fundamental
reactionary principle, Ascham insisted that formal education (doctrinal,
and b y the book) w as supe rior to direct experience, and that the majority
of people were too weak to obtain good moral principles from direct
experience. The mora l purpos e of travel wa s never at issue - for travel, all
agreed, involved the search for virtue as much as profit. The question
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166 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 well-
in formed bu t d ry
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
Commonweal th . Fadr ique Fur io Cer io l ' 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 kno wledge of foreign langua ges, 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-cri t icism. In fact , a true understanding of morali ty involved the
rejection of the facile dichotom y in wh ich 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 Ascha m '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 prom ise of a p ard on
(1559-1564). This crisis coincided with Ph ilip 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
M adrid, offering liberal advice that was rarely followed (although he w as
allowed to assist in Luis de Requesens' attempt to pacify Flanders). He
did not publish any further books.
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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,
desp ite the existence of an early generation of English contribution s to the
genre of educational treatises for the nobility, from Thomas Elyot's
Boke
named the governour of 1531 to Thomas Hoby ' s la te t rans la t ion of
Catiglione's Courtier in 1561 (again, it is not coincidental that b oth 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 -
supe rsede d 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