Reading the Ottoman Empire: Intertextuality and Experience in Henry Blount’s <i>Voyage into the Levant</i> (1636)

Abstract The English traveller Henry Blount (1602–1682), author of A Voyage into the Levant (1636), is renowned for attempting to view Ottoman Empire with an open mind and understand it on its own terms. Scholars have examined Blount’s attitude cultural difference, as well his relationship emerging discourses empiricism, especially works Francis Bacon. This essay argues that politics philosophical outlook are fundamentally connected to, and, in some cases, problematized by, intertextual strategies. It shows digestion reading shapes theoretical approach travel, including understanding perception, cognition, experience, central description Empire. As identifying borrowings from paraphrases writings by Bacon, Michel de Montaigne, George Sandys, indirectly, Aristotle, my argument demonstrates early modern travel writing offers striking example parallels between observation characterize period more generally.