rubiés - instructions for travellers- theaching the to see

8/8/2019 Rubiés - Instructions for Travellers- Theaching the to See

1/53

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


2/53

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


3/53

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


4/53

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


5/53


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


6/53

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


7/53


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


8/53

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


9/53


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


10/53


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


11/53


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


12/53


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


13/53

INSTRUCTIONS FOR TRA VELLE RS 151

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


14/53

152 JOAN-PAU RUBIES

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


15/53

INSTRUCTIONS FOR TRAVELLER S 153

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


16/53

154 JOAN-PAU RUBIES

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


17/53

INSTRUCTIONS FOR TRAVE LLERS 155

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


18/53


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


19/53


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).


20/53


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


21/53


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


22/53

160 JOAN-PAU RUBIES

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


23/53


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


24/53

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.


25/53


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


26/53


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


27/53

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


28/53

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.


29/53

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

rubiés - instructions for travellers- theaching the to see

Documents