![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Despite its increasing prominence in university syllabi and anthologies, travel writing continues to be excluded from the canon of early modern literature. Its exclusion can be attributed to the view, articulated explicitly and implicitly, that its formal and stylistic conventions render it insufficiently ‘literary’. Such assessments reveal a tendency to read early modern travel accounts using aesthetic criteria that are anachronistic, disconnected from the discursive contexts in which these accounts were originally written and read. This article examines one of the genre’s most distinctive features, one which has shaped its relationship to notions of literary value and canonicity: its preoccupation with particulars, something early modern and modern readers alike characterise as ‘tedious’. Focusing on Thomas Coryate’s eponymous Coryats Crudities (1611), it situates the particularity of early modern travel writing within the reconstructed contexts of classical rhetoric, early modern poetics, and travel advice, placing special emphasis on the rhetorical quality of enargeia, or vividness. In addition to offering a fresh assessment of the Crudities and modelling a new approach to the study of travel writing more generally, the article reflects on how we can expand our sense of what early modern literature might be said to comprise.
Acknowledgements
For their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this article, I would like to thank Rhodri Lewis, Kathryn Murphy, Anthony Ossa-Richardson, Emma Smith, the editors of this special issue, and the anonymous reader for Textual Practice.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Sixteenth Century/ The Early Seventeenth Century, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al., 10th edn (New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 2018), pp. 609–57.
2 Ibid., pp. 609–12.
3 For an example of such an anthology, see Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments, ed. Arthur F. Kinney, 2nd edn (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005).
4 Rachel Donadio, ‘Keeper of the Canon’, The New York Times (8 January 2006). https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/books/review/keeper-of-the-canon.html. Accessed 24 November 2021.
5 There are important exceptions. See, for example, Nandini Das, ‘Early Modern Travel Writing (2): English Travel Writing’, in Nandini Das and Tim Youngs (eds), The Cambridge History of Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 77–92.
6 C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), p. 437.
7 John Guillory, ‘The Ideology of Canon-Formation: T.S. Eliot and Cleanth Brooks’, Critical Inquiry 10.1 (1983), pp. 173–98 (p. 175). It is important to note, however, that travel writing’s rise to prominence within scholarship on early modern literature was galvanised by the New Historicism, which read travel writing using methods previously reserved for ‘high’ literary forms. See, for instance, Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), and Mary Baine Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).
8 For an important study of race and coloniality in early modern travel writing, see Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), esp. pp. 25–61.
9 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, p. 7. For other discussions of truth in travel writing, see Jonathan Sell, Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560–1613 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); J. P. A. Sell, ‘Embodying truth in early modern English travel writing’, Studies in Travel Writing 16.3 (2012), pp. 227–41; Julia Schleck, Telling True Tales of Islamic Lands: Forms of Mediation in English Travel Writing (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2011); Kirsten Sandrock, ‘Truth and Lying in Early Modern Travel Narratives: Coryat’s Crudiites, Lithgow’s Totall Discourse and Generic Change’, European Journal of English Studies 19.2 (2015), pp. 189–203.
10 Robert Coverte, A True and Almost Incredible Report of an Englishman […] With a Particular Description of all those Kingdomes, Cities, and People (London, 1631); Richard Lassels, A Voyage of Italy (London, 1670), p. 22.
11 William Biddulph, The Travels of certaine Englishmen (London, 1609), pp. 1, 46, 115, 130.
12 Mary C. Fuller, ‘“His Dark Materials”: The Problem of Dullness in Hakluyt’s Collections’, in Daniel Carey and Claire Jowitt (eds), Richard Hakluyt and Travel Writing in Early Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 231–42 (p. 231).
13 It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss Coryate’s other writings, such as the collection of his letters from India entitled Thomas Coriate Traveller for the English Wits: Greeting from the Court of the Great Mogul, Resident at the Towne of Asmere, in Easterne India (London, 1618).
14 For a recent study of Coryate’s relationship to the wits, see Julian T. S. Neuhauser, ‘Sirenaicks, Guilds and a New Coryate Manuscript’, The Review of English Studies 74.313 (2023), pp. 31–46.
15 Augustus Jessopp, ‘Coryate, Thomas (1577?–1617)’, DNB, ed. Leslie Stephen, 63 vols. 12: 259–60. See also Encyclopædia Metropolitana; or, Universal Dictionary of Knowledge, Edward Smedley et al. (eds) (London, 1829–43), 28 vols. 21: 630.
16 See notes to Ben Jonson, ‘Certain Opening and Drawing Distichs’, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online, https://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/benjonson/ [accessed 24 November 2021].
17 Peter Womack, ‘The Writing of Travel’, in A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 527–42 (pp. 537–8).
18 Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 115–45 (p. 115). For a similar remark see Kenneth Parker, Early Modern Tales of Orient: A Critical Anthology (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 107.
19 On the style of the Crudities, see, e.g., Andrew Hadfield, Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels: Travel and Colonial Writing in English, 1550–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 28; and Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 58; Helen Wilcox, 1611: Authority, Gender and the Word in Early Modern England (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), p. 72.
20 Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary Written by Fynes Moryson Gent., 3 parts (London, 1617), 3.2.12. On the alimentary in early modern literature more generally, see Text, Food and the Early Modern Reader: Eating Words, ed. Jason Scott-Warren and Andrew Zurcher (London: Routledge, 2018). For another discussion of digestion in early modern travel writing, see my ‘Reading the Ottoman Empire: Intertextuality and Experience in Henry Blount’s Voyage into the Levant (1636)’, The Review of English Studies 74.313 (2023), pp. 47–63.
21 Aelius Donatus, Life of Virgil, trans. David Wilson-Okamura (1996, rev. 2005, 2008). www.virgil.org/vitae/a-donatus.htm [accessed 10 September 2023]. Cassiodorus, Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning and On the Soul, trans. James W. Halporn (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2004), p. 114.
22 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 6 vols., ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling and Rhonda L. Blair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989–2000), p. 1: 9.
23 Thomas Neale, A Treatise of Direction (London, 1643), p. 27.
24 OED, s.v. ‘crudity’, n., 1a–b, 2a.
25 OED, s.v. ‘excrement’, n.1
26 Crudities, sig. ar.
27 Ibid., sig. a4r–a5v.
28 The origins of this tradition lie in the Progymnasmata. See Theon, Progymnasmata, ed. and trans. Michel Patillon, (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1997), 118.6–120, pp. 66–9; Ps.-Hermogenes, Progymnasmata in Opera, ed. Hugo Rabe (Leipzig, 1913), p.22; Aphthonius, Progymnasmata, ed. Hugo Rabe (Leipzig, 1926), p.36; Nikolaos, Progymnasmata, ed. Joseph Felten (Leipzig, 1913), p. 68.
29 See, e.g., Cicero, De oratore, ed. and trans. E.W. Sutton and H. Rackham, 2 vols (London: Heinemann, 1942), 3.202; [Cicero], Rhetorica ad Herennium, ed. and trans. Harry Caplan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 4.39.51, 4.55.68–69; Quintilian, The Orator's Education, ed. and trans. D.A. Russell, 5 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 4.2.63–65, 6.2.29–35, 8.3.61–72. See Ruth Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), esp. pp. 87–130; Heinrich F. Plett, Enargeia in Classical Antiquity and the Early Modern Age: The Aesthetics of Evidence (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 7–21.
30 Webb, Ekphrasis, esp. pp. 131–65.
31 Richard Sherry, A Treatise of the Figures of Grammer and Rhetorike, 2nd ed. (London, 1555), xlv; Thomas Wilson, The Art of Rhetorique (London, 1553), fol. 95r; Richard Rainolde, A Booke Called the Foundacion of Rhetorike (London, 1563), fol. 56r. For other early modern accounts of enargeia, see, e.g., Erasmus, The Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. R.A.B. Mynors, Robert D. Sider, J.K. Sowards, Craig R. Thompson, et al., 86 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974-), 24:577–89 (De copia, 2.5); Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London, 1577), sig. O2r.
32 Quintilian, The Orator's Education, 6.2.29–32.
33 Crudities, sigs. b2v–b3r.
34 Ibid., sig. a7r.
35 Wilson, The Art of Rhetorique, fols.16r–17r.
36 Crudities, sigs. a4v, a5v, b5v.
37 Ibid., sigs. b2r, b4r.
38 Ibid., 64–6.
39 Hermann Kirchner, De Gravissimis Aliquot Cum Juridicis Tum Politicis Quaestionibus in utramque partem discussis, Orationes (Frankfurt, 1599), 57.
40 Albrecht Meyer, Certaine Briefe, and Speciall Instructions trans. Philip Jones (London, 1589), 8–9; Francis Bacon, The Oxford Francis Bacon, ed. Michael Kiernan, Graham Rees, Alan Stewart, Maria Wakely, et al., 15 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996–), XV: 56.
41 Jerome Turler, The Traveiler of Jerome Turler (London, 1575), 187.
42 See, e.g., Crudities, 38, 141, 163.
43 Ibid., 342.
44 Ibid., 89.
45 George Sandys, A Relation of a Journey (London, 1615), sig. A2r.
46 Angus Vine, In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 139-–68 (p. 143).
47 Edward Chaney, The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations since the Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 205–8.
48 Michelle O’Callaghan, ‘Coryats Crudities (1611) and Travel Writing as the “Eyes” of the Prince’, in Timothy Wilks (ed.), Prince Henry Revived: Image and Exemplarity in Early Modern England (London: Southampton Solent University, 2007), pp. 85–103.
49 Melanie Ord, ‘Returning from Venice to England: Sir Henry Wotton as Diplomat, Pedagogue and Italian Cultural Connoisseur’, in Thomas Betteridge (ed.), Borders and Travellers in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 147–67 (esp. pp. 151–2).
50 On the subjects of ekphrasis, see Webb, Ekphrasis, pp. 61–86, esp. pp. 61–2, 64, 81.
51 Philip Sidney, Defence of Poetry, in Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (eds), Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 85. For a discussion of these two kinds of mimesis (one eikastic, the other fantastic) in the poetics of Sidney and Fulke Greville, see Kathryn Murphy, ‘Greville’s Scantlings: Architecture and Measure in the Treatise Poems’, in Russ Leo, Katrin Röder, and Freya Sierhuis (eds), The Measure of the Mind: Fulke Greville and the Literary Culture of the English Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 47–61.
52 Quintilian, The Orator's Education, 8.3.66–70. See Webb, Ekphrasis, pp. 90–1.
53 Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices libri septem (1561; Leiden, 1594), pp. 306–7.
54 Raymond-Jean Frontain, ‘Donne, Coryate, and the Sesqui-Superlative’, Explorations in Renaissance Culture 29.2 (2003), pp. 211–24 (pp. 212–3).
55 Crudities, 172.
56 Ibid., 80.
57 OED, s.v. ‘tedious’, adj., senses 1a, 3, and 4.
58 Moryson, An Itinerary Written by Fynes Moryson Gent., ‘To the Reader’; OED, s.v. ‘frieze’, n.1, ‘jerkin’, n.1.
59 Wilson, The Art of Rhetorique, fol. 90v.
60 OED, s.v. ‘dilate’, v.1 and v.2. For a discussion of dilation that emphasises its temporal aspects, see Patricia Parker, ‘Dilation and Delay: Renaissance Matrices’, Poetics Today 5.3 (1984), pp. 519–35.