Introduction 1
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Notes Introduction 1. Both Justin Stagl in A History of Curiosity (64, 84) and George B. Parks in “Travel as Education” (264–65) describe ars apodemica as flourishing from about 1570 to 1630. 2. William Thomas’ The History of Italy, for example, is the product of a humanist conception of travel as a means to equip one with the kinds of knowledge and skills able to effect one’s promotion back home, a prepa- ration, through experience, for a state career. 3. This debate continued throughout the early modern period and even beyond, as studies by Jeremy Black (The British Abroad), John Stoye (English Travelers Abroad, 1604–1667), and Chloe Chard (Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour) show. 4. See Stagl, History of Curiosity 58. 5. A contemporary translation of Albrecht Meyer’s book on travel method dedicated to Sir Francis Drake specifically states that travelers can draw increased profit from travel by “vouchsaf[ing] the reading, portage, and practise of this pamphlet of notes” (Certaine briefe, and speciall Instruc- tions, “Epistle Dedicatory”). 6. Thomas Coryat had entered into such an agreement with Joseph Starre, a draper from Yeovil, an incident recounted in Coryats Crambe. 7. As Kristian Jensen notes, “A danger inherent in the humanists’ passion- ate interest in presentation and style was a disdain for factual knowledge” (“Humanist Reform of Latin and Latin Teaching” 77). 8. For examples of the latter, see especially Anthony Grafton, “New Sci- ence and the Traditions of Humanism”; Ann Blair and Anthony Grafton, “Reassessing Humanism and Science”; and Cesare Vasoli, “The Contri- bution of Humanism to the Birth of Modern Science.” For studies that make the former approach, see note 22 to this chapter. 9. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer in Leviathan and the Air-Pump iden- tify three main ways by which witnesses can be secured and matters of fact thereby established: by sharing in a scientific experiment in the labo- ratory; by replicating the experiments contained in written reports; and by “virtual witnessing.” They cite as evidence Robert Boyle’s claim that 198 Notes readers “need not reiterate themselves an experiment to have as distinct an idea of it, as may suffice them to ground their reflexions and specula- tions upon” (Leviathan and the Air-Pump 62). 10. As Mary Baine Campbell notes in The Witness and the Other World, this tension “was eventually to resolve itself in the increasing separation of two spheres of discourse, the scientific and (for lack of a better word) the novelistic” (260). 11. The New Organon is the second part of the Instauratio Magna. 12. This is of a piece with William Petty’s commentary on “the constitution, functions, membership and officers of the Royal Society” (BL Manu- scripts catalogue), when he cites its “performances” as “Instruments, Bookes, Rarityes, Collections of Experiments, Letters, Discourses” (Add 72898, fol. H5). 13. Heads of Enquiry sought to provide for this two-pronged approach of observing and collecting. See, for example, the section entitled “Direc- tions for the Collecting, Preserving, and Sending over Natural things, from Foreign Countries” in John Woodward, Brief Instructions for Making Observations in all Parts of the World. One can see the traveler responding to such requirements in BL Sloane 1911, which contains let- ters from Edward Browne from Vienna to his father, dated 24 April (fol. 25–26) and 8 August 1669 (fols. 44–45). 14. See, in particular, Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts and “New Science and the Traditions of Humanism”; Blair and Grafton, “Reassessing Humanism and Science”; Brian Ogilvie, “The Many Books of Nature” and The Science of Describing; Timothy Reiss, Knowledge, Dis- covery and Imagination in Early Modern Europe; Vasoli, “Contribution of Humanism to the Birth of Modern Science”; Jessica Wolfe, Human- ism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature; and Jess Edwards, Writing, Geometry, and Space in Seventeenth-Century England and America. 15. Ascham writes in The Scholemaster that “bookes of common places be verie necessarie to induce a man, into an orderlie generall knowledge, how to referre orderlie all that he readeth, ad certa rerum Capita, and not wander in studie” (English Works 259), a phrase indicative of his concern to use travel as a trope for learning. 16. See Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes for a study of how scientific discov- ery can aid imperial expansion. Amy Boesky’s “Bacon’s New Atlantis and the Laboratory of Prose” and Amir Alexander’s “The Imperialist Space of Elizabethan Mathematics” are also useful contributions to this debate. Edwards in Writing, Geometry, and Space presents a challenge to the view that mathematics unproblematically served imperialist agendas. 17. See, for example, Tim Youngs, “Where Are We Going?,” and Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Travel Writing and Ethnography.” 18. Mary Fuller in Voyages in Print qualifies Stephen Greenblatt’s and Jeffrey Knapp’s picture of English settlers empowered through their possession of advanced technology by counterbalancing native American possession Notes 199 of food supplies; she also reads early modern English representa- tions of engagements in the New World as attempts to recoup various historical failures. 19. As represented by, for example, Parks, “Travel as Education.” See also Sara Warneke’s Images of the Educational Traveler for a more recent study in this tradition. 20. Although William H. Sherman in “Stirrings and Searchings (1500– 1720)” notes that “[b]efore Dunton began his more famous career as a bookseller and newspaper publisher, he traveled to America as part of a projected ‘Ramble through Ten Kingdoms’ [and] drew extensively upon his actual journeys in A Voyage Round the World” (33), Dunton’s narrator does not get further than the familiar locations of south-east England. 21. See, for example, Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere. Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna Singh’s collection of critical essays, Travel Knowledge, makes the convincing case that early modern travel narratives should be distin- guished from—even though they helped to influence—texts that date from the period of colonial consolidation from the post-mid-eighteenth century, partly because their representational strategies are rendered increasingly complex by a three-way relationship between non-Europe- ans, Europeans, and European competitors. 22. See especially Denise Albanese, New Science, New World; Barbara M. Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry; Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science; and Lorraine Daston and Katha- rine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750. 23. The Grand Tour normally included the Low Countries, Germany, Swit- zerland and France, and held as its symbolic center a view of Italy and, especially, Rome. From Calais the traveler could pursue a number of routes into Italy, the majority traveling through Paris and Lyons, fol- lowed by either the Alps (usually via the Mt. Cenis pass to Turin and then to either Lombardy or Genoa) or, less popularly, the sea route to Leghorn. Few traveled south of Naples or to Iberia, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans. 24. This view is a source of satire in Joseph Hall’s Mundus Alter et Idem (1605). 25. Pratt shows how this is also true of a later period of natural history, noting that in the totalizing gaze of Linnaeus’ classificatory system, “The differ- ences of distance factored themselves out of the picture: with respect to mimosas, Greece could be the same as Venezuela, West Africa, or Japan; the label ‘granitic peaks’ can apply identically to Eastern Europe, the Andes, or the American West” (Imperial Eyes 31). 26. Adrian Johns, in The Nature of the Book, identifies scientific and travel texts as comparable instances of the difficulties inherent in establishing and maintaining credibility in print. 27. For other comments on the competitive aspect to precise measurements at the level of both travel observation and travel writing, see Michael T. 200 Notes Bravo, “Precision and Curiosity in Scientific Travel.” For critical consid- erations of the social constitution of scientific inquiry see in particular Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump; Shapin, A Social His- tory of Truth; Peter Dear, Revolutionising the Sciences; Barbara Shapiro, A Culture of Fact; and Daniel Garber, “Experiment, Community, and the Constitution of Nature.” 28. Contarini, Commonwealth and Government of Venice, “To the Reader” A2r. 29. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions 103. Chapter 1 1. Ascham describes in the preface to The Scholemaster how he began the book in December 1563 in response to a request by Richard Sackville and continued to work on it until the death of Sackville, which occurred in 1566. Ascham then abandoned it for almost two years before complet- ing it on the suggestion of another (thought to be Sir William Cecil). Ascham died in 1568. A manuscript version of The Scholemaster (1563) is at British Library Royal 18 B XXIV. fol. 47. See George B. Parks’ “The First Draft of Ascham’s Scholemaster” for a discussion of the dating of the manuscript and for a succinct account of the differences between the manuscript and the printed edition of 1570. 2. Eton, like St. Paul’s, Winchester, and Westminster, was a school whose humanist curriculum was used as a model for secondary education in schools throughout England. 3. See, in particular, T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke; Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities; Alan Stewart, Close Readers; and Rebecca W. Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching. 4. See, for example, Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege; R. W. Maslen, Elizabethan Fictions; and Alistair Fox, The English Renaissance. 5. Yet other categories of travel, such as mercantile travel, can have ambiva- lent and unpredictable effects, with merchants introducing into England products that are seen by certain moralists to promote a luxury that weakens English fibre.