1Throughout its history, the travel guide has proven a particularly flexible and innovative genre, a locus for experimenting with literary devices and modes, while opening itself to a broad array of interdisciplinary approaches in its interpretation (Roche 19). Taking as its point of reference the physical self, “cet ici absolu” (“the absolute here”) to use Paul Ricœur’s phrase (Ricœur 185), the travel guide is never about place as a mere set of geographical coordinates or features, but as inhabited or lived-through space. It shares with the neighbouring genres of the documentary, the essay, and the journal a concern with making the traveller’s self constantly intersect in more or less disguised form with the travelled space and the travelled text. This makes the travel guide qualify doubly as a “discourse on the move” (Thurlow and Jaworski 36).

2The essential fluidity and versatility of the genre lends itself particularly well to recording the experience of a hybrid self in a hybrid world as ours currently is to a large extent, but that experience is certainly not always as recreational and pleasurable as many of our daily consumed goods and souvenirs sampled from around the world could make us believe. At times, as I will try to show in this essay, the travel guide can and does become both a location and a strategy for othering the self and selfing the other in contexts in which faith and survival are at stake.

3The example I have chosen to illustrate this point is that of an engaging precursor of the likes of our modern Lonely Planet volumes and their accompanying phrase books, presented in an innocently entertaining guise. The Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge (composed in 1542 and published in 1547) is the work of Andrew Boorde (c.1490–1549), [1] originally a Carthusian monk and later a physician and government informant at the service of Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell. A great traveller in his time, Boorde undertook several journeys that led him to all three continents of the Old World between 1528 and 1547, staying at several university towns in Germany, Italy, and France to further his medical studies (including Toulouse and Montpellier where he would have been a contemporary of François Rabelais), travelling through France, Spain and Portugal on missions for Cromwell to test continental opinions regarding the King’s divorce, undertaking pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela and to Jerusalem, briefly visiting Barbary from which he sent rhubarb seeds home, practising medicine at Glasgow and travelling extensively in the British Isles. The last couple of years of Boorde’s life were spent less glamorously, in the Fleet prison where he remained out of royal favour and church protection, before embarking from there on the greatest journey awaiting all of us in the end.

4His book’s title is somewhat misleading, as no further “knowledge” is to follow this “introduction” and no second volume to come is announced in the dedicatory epistle to princess Mary, the future Mary I, that opens the book. Thus if the work as it has reached us is to be considered a first, it is rather as a first of its kind in the aims it sets for itself as early as its subtitle, which promises that the volume will “teache a man to speake parte of all maner of languages, and to know the vsage and fashion of all maner of countreys. And for to know the moste parte of all maner of coynes of money, the whych is currant in euery region.”

5Contemporary research on travel writing seldom considers works produced before the eighteenth century to qualify as travel guide books per se, and Richard Lassels’s launching of the vogue of the educational Grand Tour in his Voyage of Italy (1670) is generally cited as the earliest full model for the genre in English (Chaney). Yet, I will argue, long before Lassels, and then much later John Murray and Karl Baedecker’s standardised guides in the nineteenth century, Boorde undertakes a very personal work of standardisation to rationalise his travels as a guide rather than as an account, listing a number of countries and regions and presenting them through more or less the same items: a title and a woodcut representing a (generally male) inhabitant in ostensibly typical dress, a short humorous poem to encapsulate a few national characteristics in an entertaining way, a few lines or pages on the country’s historical background, distinctive features and places of interest to be visited, details about the currency or currencies used there, and whenever possible a specimen of basic words transcribed phonetically. The list generally includes words for numbers, greetings and polite formulas, as well as a few set sentences to order food and ask for accommodation.

6A typical example is chapter 27 on France, with its liminal poem paying a precursor’s tribute to what future generations will know as the French traditions of gastronomie and haute couture:

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I am a French man lusty and stout

My rayment is jagged and cut round about

I am ful of new inuencions

And dayly I do make new toyes and fashions

All nacions of me example do take

Whan [sic] any garment they go about to make

8The chapter is also typical in its examples of phonetically transcribed foreign sentences, as indicated by the following selection, laid out here as Boorde’s text is presented:

9As the example of France shows, Boorde’s organisation makes his book a halfway point between a practical travel guide meant to serve actual travellers (the equivalent of our modern pocket tourist guides, complete with a phrase book and a table of conversion for currencies) and a book of Theophrastian characters or moral emblems meant both to delight and instruct the non-travelling reader. Somewhat like an emblem book offering a picture, a motto and a moral explanation following it, Boorde’s ordering of his material breaks down the continuity of travel experience into separate chapters each focusing on a given set of stereotypes, as an introduction to the knowledge of each nation’s or people’s received images. In doing so, he follows the tradition of the “devisement du monde” in Marco Polo’s famous title, in which devisement means both dividing the world into so many cities, provinces or islands, and encapsulating each as it were in the manner of a “devise” (a short moralised description, a motto), which frames the experience and directs its meaning. Just as Marco Polo’s or Sir John Mandeville’s accounts virtually offered the reader one island and one chapter per marvel, Boorde’s organisation of his material often focuses on one or a couple of potentially moralised stereotypes per country or nation. One frequently quoted example in this respect is that of Boorde’s doggerel on the Turk, reducing the latter’s religion to some devilish, potentially cannibalistic rite:

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I am a turk and machamytes [Muhammad’s] law do kepe

I do proll for my pray whan other be a slepe

My law wyllith me no swynes flesh to eate

It shall not greatly forse for I haue other meate

11We can notice here the possible pun on “pray,” telescoping the image of the Turk sneaking out of his house in the early hours of morning to go to the mosque and pray, and the predatory image of a hunter prowling while looking for a potential prey. This results in his obtaining some mysterious and worrying “other meat” to replace the forbidden swine’s flesh.

12Taken at face value, the general organisation of the Introduction of Knowledge makes it appear, overall, emblematic and moralising, taking the English reader on a journey from his native innocence to foreign experience. It is significant in this respect that the first chapter should open with a woodcut showing a naked Englishman holding a pair of scissors in one hand and a length of folded cloth on his other arm, ready to cut himself an apparel out of many dazzling foreign fashions:

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I am an English man, and naked I stand here

Musyng in my mynde, what rayment I shal were

For now I wyll were thys and now I wyll were that

Now I wyl were I cannot tel what

All new fashyons be pleasaunt to me

I wyl haue them, whether I thryue or thee

14Dis-covered in his original, Edenic nakedness, the Englishman of the first chapter thus appears as much as an emblem of child-like innocence as one of potential foolishness or of aspiring vanity waiting to stand the test of the world and be tempted into falling for its infinite choice of fashions and babbling its many languages. The Englishman’s voice effectively traverses the entire volume, with his words taken from him in every land to be claimed by foreign identities and othered into many tongues, to the point that it is often not clear who the traveller and the local are in the models of imaginary dialogues in which they greet each other and enquire about one another’s circumstances. Determining “whether I thryve or thee” proves difficult indeed in all these encounters. Commenting on this passage, Maurizio Ascari sees a distant echo of this transcultured Englishman in Portia’s English suitor Baron Falconbridge in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (c.1596), who “bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany and his behaviour everywhere” (1.2.69-71) (Ascari 19).

15The opposite end of Boorde’s volume takes us farthest from an English home, all the way to the Holy Land, with a fully dressed Jew as the ultimate representative of alterity, exchanging the last blessings of the journey and of life with the traveller: “Iesus of nazareth kyng of Iues. The son of God haue mercy on me. Amen” (sig. N4^r). The Jew holds a walking stick in his hand and is about to become the wandering Jew who will make the journey back over the North African and European territories covered by the volume. Between the two extremes of the journey materialised by the figures of the Englishman and the Jew, the wanderer par excellence (Holmberg 13), what the seemingly static and descriptive organisation of the volume gradually puts in place is in fact a distance from the self, a geographical journey for the traveller doubled by a mental and spiritual journey for the English reader measuring his beliefs and standards by and against the rest of the world. The figure of the Jew as well as the motif of the journey away from and back to the self also briefly feature in chapter 7, devoted to the author’s own circumstances, with a twist on the well-known expression “I am a Jew if…,” usually denoting an impossible prospect and a non-transformation. Here the phrase is turned as it were on its head to become “if I were a Jew…” (sig. E1^r), before being followed by a consideration of what the author’s reaction would be in front of his native England if such a transformation were indeed to take place.

16Given the would-be impersonal organisation of most chapters outside this one, it is remarkable to see how much Boorde actually manages to write, not just an English self, but his own self into the book. This specific chapter, dealing primarily with the circumstances that brought about his travels, is completed by an engraving captioned “Doctor Boorde,” which is incidentally also an interesting case of othering the self or of selfing another, insofar as it corresponds to a recycling by printer William Copland of a 1528 woodcut portrait of the poet laureate John Skelton wearing his crown of laurel on the title page of his Dyuers balettys and dyties solacyous (Furnivall 143). But beyond this chapter, which is ostensibly the only one devoted to the author, Boorde’s presence can be felt all over the volume. As noted by R.W. Maslen, the author’s constant preoccupation with room and “board” in every country or region he visits humourosly puns on his own name (Maslen 481). The set sentences “give me bread,” “give me flesh,” “give me cheese,” “give me wine” come back in nearly every country, incidentally telling us something of the favoured diet of this former Carthusian monk who sounds anything but monastic in his eating habits. Likewise, his many sentences involving maidens and dames of every nation who are asked about the quality of the lodgings they provide could make the reader raise a suspicious eyebrow as to Boorde’s travelling persona’s idea of a pleasant evening in a foreign land.

17Chapter 35, with its imaginary conversation between a Latin-speaking man and an Englishman, offers Boorde another opportunity to bridge the gap between his travelling self and the would-be impersonal, yet show-through frame of his set sentences, with once more a pun on his own name:

18Commenting on Borde/Boorde’s “bored” (in the sense of “pierced through” or “perforated”) identity in this passage, Cathy Shrank notes how much his oblique self-writing strategies tell us about the preoccupations of this former monk who had been released from his vows long before and had taken the oath of allegiance in 1534, but who remained under suspicion of holding to his unreformed faith throughout the rest of his life (Shrank 24). Boorde’s account in chapter 32 of Santiago de Compostela, for instance, which he had visited as a pilgrim in 1532, prior to his taking the oath, records rather uncritically the miracle of the white cock and hen of Saint Domingo (sig. L3^r-v) and includes a section on the hypothetical location of the relics of Saint James (sig. L4^r). All of this appears problematic in a post-reformation account, and things are made even more complicated by the fact that the work is dedicated to Mary, the one staunchly Catholic child of Henry VIII. It is true that Boorde’s description in chapter 16 of Saxony in general and of Wittenberg in particular contains the obligatory condemnation of the Pope: “[The people of the country] do not regarde the byshoppe of Rome nor the Romayns for certain abusions” (sig. G2^v). But the account equally criticises in the same breath and in its next sentence Protestant practices such as the rejection of celibacy for priests: “Martyn Leuter and other of hys factours in certayne thynges dyd take synistrall opinions, as concernynge prestes to haue wyues wyth such like matters” (sig. G2^v).

19In view of the doctrinal confusion of such passages, the emblem of the naked Englishman of the opening chapter hesitating between a variety of foreign fashions takes on another dimension and calls for further interpretation. Having given up on the old faith, this Everyman, whose figure also includes that of the author, has lost his identity and seems unable to decide whether he should follow the fashion of the married priests of Saxony, the abusive way of Rome, or his own personal preferences. The internal contradictions of Boorde’s volume thus also make it a dynamic illustration of the impact of the English Reformation on an individual’s life and work in the reign of Henry VIII—an individual suddenly finding his old allegiances and his inherited self as tattered and “bored through” as the “perforatus” image of him conjured in chapter 35.

20The wayward journeys of Boorde’s volume mirror to some extent his own trajectory. The background story he offers of the composition of the book in the above-mentioned chapter 7 on the author gives us an idea of the strategies of survival which at the time were necessary to a former monk first turned into a reformist protégé of Thomas Cromwell, and after the fall of the latter trying to fashion himself anew as a staunch loyalist. In that chapter, Boorde describes the fate of the first version of his travel account, which he says he had originally sent to “one Thomas cromwell [sic],” who “bycause he had many matters of [state] to dyspatche for al England, my boke was lost” (sig. E1^v). [2] That single, yet intriguing reference to Cromwell in the volume is enough to recall the key role played by that great present-absent figure in initiating most of the journeys undertaken by Boorde as a government informant. Here, Cromwell is no longer the “ryght honerable lorde the lord of the pryue seale” of Boorde’s earlier correspondence from the continent, an example of which is reproduced in Frederick James Furnival’s Early English Text Society edition of The Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge (Furnival 62). And yet, despite taking his distance from the fallen minister in this minimalist reference, Boorde cannot bring himself to leave either Cromwell or his own connection to him completely out of the account. Lost and written afresh, both Boorde’s travel book and his allegiance come across as survivors out of troubled times. Read against this background, even the book’s obsession with clothes and the “bored” English figure left helpless and naked in the first chapter recalls the one title Cromwell was left with after all his honours were forfeited in 1540: “Thomas Cromwell, cloth carder” (Gibbs 557).

21If one way of apprehending The Introduction of Knowledge is to consider it as an emblem book, it is worth noting that its chief concern is with emblems of faithfulness and unfaithfulness. Beyond the possible indirect reference to Cromwell, these issues particularly surface in the considerable attention devoted to the clothes worn by the different nations met in the course of Boorde’s travels. While the Englishman of the opening chapter is naked and hesitant between so many different styles and allegiances, his religious opposite, the Roman of chapter 23, is described as inconstant in everything except his outside appearance: “Yet in my apparel I am not mutable / Althowh in other theynges I am founde variable” (sig. H4^v). Sticking outwardly to the old ways of the Church, the Roman seems to have lost the meaning of the deeper teachings of his faith. This makes him inferior even to the Turk who despite his barbaric mores is praised for keeping both his old fashions and his promise: “In vsyng my rayment I am not varyable, / Nor of promis I am not mutable” (sig. M4^v). In fact in the whole of the volume, only one group shares the Englishman’s nudity, and that is the identity-deprived category of slaves sold in Barbary, appearing in the opening doggerel of chapter 36, with a direct association established between their nakedness and their being unchristened: “If I be vnchristend, merchauntes do not care / They by me in markets be I neuer so bare” (sig. M3^r). Thus through the running metaphor of clothing applied to all the lands visited in the volume, the experience of faith primarily translates into the experience of the body and its outward appearance, becoming itself the body of the text and of the woodcut completing it.

22Taken as a whole, as I hope the few examples described here have shown, Boorde’s Introduction of Knowledge is much more than a precursor to later utilitarian travel guides. The inherent flexibility of the genre of travel writing is what has allowed Boorde to produce a volume which, using the distinctions defined by Peter Hulme, is as much about “being there” as it is about “being there” (Hulme 5). The concern with living through the experience, and more often than not, surviving through it, even surfaces in the seemingly everyday phrase book sections, such as the one quoted above from chapter 27 on France, and which disturbingly ends on words of caution for the benefit of those who run the risk of revealing themselves too much in their speech or writings:

23

My frend if you do speke take hede to thy selfe

Mon amy si tu parles garda toy

To speke to much is a dargerous [sic] thynge

Le trop parler est daugerous [sic].

24A possible mise-en-abyme of the author placing himself at the heart of his own work to become the embedded addressee of his own caveat, the passage could serve as an epigraph to the whole volume, announcing its primary concern not to be “trauayl[ing] thorow and round about all the regions of Christynte” (as announced in the opening dedication to Mary Tudor, sig. A1^v), but to survive through this journey of changing lands and changing faiths.

25Travel and travel writing are always fundamentally about the discovery of the self in the apprehension of the other, and the distance which is so inherently fascinating to both a writer and a reader of voyages is ultimately the distance from the self, with all that this implies in terms of gaps (Boorde’s “perforations”) which one may or may not choose to close, the differences which one might absorb, and the spaces which one might annex in imagination or in effect. Reflecting the uncertainty and the confusion of the first decade of the break from Rome, Boorde’s travel guide cum emblem book largely intersects with the period’s key concern of negotiating a personal and an English self in the midst of many religious and political turbulences both at home and abroad. A missing link between the theory and practice of discovery, Boorde’s hybrid work can thus truly be considered an introduction to the knowledge of the place of the self through a knowledge of the place of the other.