Epitomes of Dacia: Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania in Early Modern English Travelogues

This essay examines the kaleidoscopic and abridged perspectives on three early modern principalities (Wallachia, Moldavia, Transylvania), whose lands are now part of modern-day Romania. I examine travelogues geography texts describing these Eastern European territories written by Marco Polo (1579), Abraham Ortelius (1601; 1608), Nicolas de Nicolay (1585), Johannes Boemus (1611), Pierre d’Avity (1615), Francisco Guicciardini (1595), George Abbot (1599), Uberto Foglietta (1600), William Biddulph (1609), Richard Hakluyt (1599-1600), Fynes Moryson (1617), Sir Henry Blount (1636), published in England period 1579-1636. The also offers brief incursions into representations geographic spaces a number Shakespearean plays, such as Merchant Venice Othello, well Pericles, Prince Tyre Shakespeare Wilkins. argue that locations configure an erratic spatiality conflates ancient place names with ones, they reconstruct space-time continuum is neither real nor totally imaginary. These represent real-and-fictional locations, shaping ever-changing world spatial networks reconstructed out fragments cultural ethnographic data. travel narratives marked particular kind literariness, suggesting dissension, confusion, political uncertainty to English imagination.