Making something of it: Questions of value in the early English travel collection

Author: Fuller, Mary C.

Source: Journal of Early Modern History, Volume 10, Numbers 1-2, 2006 , pp. 11-38(28)

Publisher: BRILL

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Abstract:

In the second half of the sixteenth century, experiences and narratives of English travel to distant places first began to matter enough to be collected and published. Tracing early accounts of West Africa and Muscovy through the several collections of Richard Eden (1553, 1555) and Richard Hakluyt (1589, 1600) allows for comparison of how different editors handled the same materials at different moments. The evidence suggests that both editors differentiated between the African and Russian materials according to perceptions of these materials' value, or meaning, for their own collecting and publishing projects. Looking at how this was so, and considering why it was so, provides a closer and more detailed look at how travel writing acquired value in the context of print; it also offers an an approach to the larger question of how Englishmen "read" the places and cultures they encountered, actually or virtually, outside of Europe.

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.1163/157006506777525494

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