1Scholarly investigation of travel practices and travel writing from the early modern period through to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has proved a buoyant field of inquiry in the last twenty years. The influence of some of the great figures who entered this broad territory of discussion—one thinks inevitably of Edward Said (1978), Tzvetan Todorov (1982), Stephen Greenblatt (1991), and Mary Louise Pratt (1992)—may have receded; however, this is due not to a decline of interest in the subject but to the need to challenge some of their assumptions, recognising the vast scope of material that merits discussion and the range of available interpretive approaches. This special issue addresses a range of themes across this period in relation to English and British travel, adding new contexts and perspectives on questions of national identity; the role of religion in shaping the discussion of foreign cultures; the limits of understanding apparent in such accounts; the literary, generic and rhetorical resources available to writers; and the physical and embodied condition of “exotic” travel. India remains a focal point of discussion in a number of the contributions, including three papers focusing on seventeenth-century descriptions of the Mughal court, and a paper on narratives by women travellers caught up in the Indian Uprising in 1857-58. India provided a staple of English travel narratives, initially due to its status as a desired trading partner and, in due course, a major colonial possession in the nineteenth century. [1] These essays are joined by investigations of the early modern guide book, the captivity narrative in Muslim North Africa, and readings of “race” and national character in a Scottish and British setting in the eighteenth century.

2This introduction provides an opportunity to reflect on trends in criticism concerned with English travel and to connect common patterns in these discussions. The first point is that a number of the contributions explore travel literature as forming part of intellectual history. There has always been an interest in the mental makeup of travellers and how this informed their vision of unfamiliar countries and customs, but a much more rigorously conceived approach has become possible following work on the wider European context of travel theory and practice, such as numerous publications by Frank Lestringant, including his study of traditions of cosmography (1991); Anthony Pagden’s investigation of natural law and narratives of travel (1986, 1993); articulation of traditions of advice on observation by Justin Stagl (1995); and a range of studies by Joan-Pau Rubiés, including his book on European responses to South Asia (2004). [2] In this special issue, Richard Raiswell pursues the possibilities of intellectual history in reading the work of the English cleric Edward Terry (1589/90–1660), chaplain to the ambassador Sir Thomas Roe (during his embassy to the Mughal court to establish a firmer foundation for English trade on behalf of the East India Company). Raiswell traces an informing Calvinist understanding of the created world in Terry’s writing and sharply contrasts prior critical readings of his Voyage to East-India (1655) that treat his narrative as proto-colonial with what Raiswell describes as the working out of “Calvinist geography.” Tim Mc Inerney’s discussion of national character and race in the eighteenth-century Ossian poems and the famous travel journal of Dr. Samuel Johnson also depends for its argumentative force on recovering unstable Enlightenment categories and seeing how they took hold in a literary and “empirical” context, in a way that complements investigations by Charles Withers (2007), Colin Kidd (2006), Jean Feerick (2010) and Nicholas B. Miller (2017). The dimension of intellectual history in the domain of politics is also apparent in the essay by Rita Banerjee exploring how Sir Thomas Roe represents Mughal social practices, including the issue of despotism and property rights. She suggests that Roe’s negative portrayals have more to do with his disavowal of deeper analogies between early Stuart “Britain” than with a genuine inability to understand what he was encountering.

3Religion remains a crucial category for navigating early modern texts in this special issue. Ladan Niayesh considers the intriguing example of Andrew Boorde, the widely travelled sometime monk and medic, whose Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge appeared in 1547. His summaries of national characters make him a precursor of the highly developed narrative of national difference and particularity studied by Mc Inerney in the eighteenth century. Boorde is an especially intriguing figure since the meaning of the English Reformation seems so unresolved in his case, as if it were as yet provisional. I have already noted Raiswell’s deliberations over religious sensibilities in relation to Edward Terry. In my own contribution on Terry, I describe his travel book as a glossographic work, appropriate to his profession as a priest and giver of sermons, in which the meaning of experience is completed through commentary. Terry’s lengthy digressions concerning his time in India serve to illuminate the spiritual significance of his journey through processes of explicit “application.” Marion Ann Keady’s essay shows the preoccupation with the Muslim practice of circumcision in Barbary captives’ narratives. Circumcision represented an irreversible sign of derogation from a Christian identity on the part of English and other European “renegades” who converted. The informing nature of religion in the history of English travel has been a hallmark of recent work, particularly on the Islamic world (see Julia Schleck 2011; Eva Johanna Holmberg 2011; Linda McJannet and Bernadette Andrea 2011; Matthew Dimmock 2013; Anders Ingram 2015), following leading studies by Nabil Matar (1999), Ahmad Gunny (1996), and Gerald Maclean (2004) that complement a wider turn more generally to the study of religion in literature.

4The literary perspective brought to bear on the texts studied here surfaces in a number of ways. As Niayesh observes in her article, the immense flexibility of the travel guide form (Boorde’s being an early exemplar) speaks to the protean nature of travel writing, which hybridised genres freely, including—in Boorde’s case—the emblem tradition. In my account of Terry, I investigate one example of this composite form represented by his use of the genre of the “Character”—newly invigorated in the early seventeenth century—to provide portraits of figures he encountered in India, including two memorable hidalgos (inflected through the reception of Don Quixote) and the famous English traveller and wit Thomas Coryate whose company Terry enjoyed over several months in India. Muireann O’Cinneide’s discussion of women caught up in the Indian Uprising highlights the blended genres of travel writing, refugee memoir and conflict narrative. One example of tensions in genre and register appears in narratives of transportation in a time of crisis. Usually appropriated for comic purposes in travel relations, breakdowns of such systems become critical in the moment of the “Mutiny.” Studies of the literary dynamics of English travel writing follows through on ground breaking studies by Peter Hulme (1986), Sara Suleri (1992) and Mary Fuller (1995), applying nuances of literary criticism to English and British travel narratives in commercial and colonial contexts. [3]

5Gender continues to constitute a vital category of research and hermeneutic with rich possibilities in parsing the literature of travel. Recent books by Susan Lamb (2009), Eric Dursteler (2011), Dúnlaith Bird (2012), and Yaël Schlick (2012) have shown, in different ways, the value of gendered perspectives in expanding the significance of travel from the early modern period through to the twentieth century, building on major studies by Natalie Zemon Davis (1995) and, in the context of English writing, Elizabeth Bohls (1995) and Felicity Nussbaum (1995), and more recently Bernadette Andrea (2007). O’Cinneide’s contribution looks at the predicament of women caught in mid-conflict which provided a series of tests of decorum while exposing the inadequacy of ostensibly competent male authorities charged with protecting the female representatives of the colonial class. Mc Inerney’s discussion of Scottish national character shows how crucial it was to demonstrate not merely a kind of Highland racial purity (based on descent) but also a self-image of Celtic femininity as robust, cleanly and chaste, glossed in interesting ways in Johnson’s travel book. Early modern accounts of circumcision studied by Keady reveal deep-seated worries about masculinity, sexuality and reproductive power.

6The question of representation filters through all of these discussions. Although aspects of the inheritance from New Historicism have waned (for example, in the wake of renewed attention to religion, which played a very modest role in New Historicist analyses), the theoretical underpinnings associated with the concept of representation have remained powerful. As Greenblatt memorably showed in Marvelous Possessions (1991), a rhetorical perspective was needed, predicated on notions of mediation, in which claims to “truth value” based on eyewitnessing had to be abandoned. Some of the significant influences here came from French sources, especially Michel de Certeau (1975, 1986) and François Hartog (1980), for whom the image of the other was ideologically conditioned but also infused with different rhetorics. For critics writing in this special issue, the real texture of travel writing is to be found at this level, a viewpoint that inevitably complicates travel accounts as an historical resource. This dilemma partly motivates Banerjee’s discussion of Thomas Roe, for example. But there is also the question of the unrepresented (as opposed to the misrepresented). O’Cinneide’s contribution, the last in terms of chronology, demonstrates how narratives of travel during the Indian Uprising routinely elided or anonymised the role of individuals engaged to make the transportation system work and to rectify its many problems in times of crisis.

7The discussions assembled here also remind us that travel is, above all, an embodied practice. The examples range from the starving European figures described in Edward Terry’s character sketches of Mughal India to Andrew Boorde’s earlier expression of his unabashed appetites in advertising the possibilities of Continental travel. The most arresting instance is no doubt the circumcision of Muslim converts, whether voluntary or enforced, in part because the act constituted a bodily marker of identity but also one that remained prospectively hidden and therefore subject to denial by captives on their return to England. In the very different circumstances of British-controlled India, the arduous physical conditions of travel associated with disruptions to hitherto routine methods of transport resulted, for some unfortunate women, in death as they fled the conflict. [4]

8Collectively, these inquiries invite us to reconsider the nature of travel writing. On the one hand, it remains a form that invites discussion of rhetoric, narrative and incident. On the other, it is clear that travel accounts constitute a key repository of reflection on comparative government, society, religion, and politics, containing speculation on national character and climate, among other issues, placing it in closer contact with surviving disciplines of geography, sociology and anthropology than with literature in the narrow sense. In this respect, cultural history provides the larger domain in which such inquiry takes place, a sufficiently expansive yet methodologically nuanced avenue for responding to historical experience while admitting questions of ideology, difference, and rhetoric into the interpretive equation (see Burke 2008; Calaresu, de Vivo, and Rubiés 2010).