Cultural Encounters and Self Encounters in Early Modern English Travel Autobiographies

Travel journals and diaries written by English travellers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are intent on relating individual experiences to the expectations and values of the people encountered abroad as well as those who remain at home. Their prefaces and epistles aim to reaffirm an awareness of cultural order and control prior to recounting a tale of fantastic, possibly unnerving, events. Subjects such as religion, health and food tend to be invoked in travellers’ tales. Through such topics, authors’ and readers’ sense of themselves, built up over daily experience of familiar customs and habits, can be challenged or supported. Authors find that on their travels they can never be cut off from their original communities. Differences of class, education and ethical outlook impinge forcefully upon their experience, either directly in their companions or through apprehensions of what those at home will make of their journeys. In these authors’ efforts to hold onto and promote their identity and perspective amid familiar parties and recognised factions, as much as before unimagined sights, peoples and conditions, we see some of the significant cultural forces that fashion and divide early modern individuals.