Textual Spaces

In Textual Spaces, Richard E. Keatley examines how French travelers experienced, consumed, and represented Italian space during the early modern period. This study digs beneath the façade of leisurely travel literature to unearth a complex web of rhetorical, sociological, and political values that conditioned and informed the experiences of French travelers in Italy.Utilizing period maps and geographical sources, Keatley combines rigorous philological mapping of travelers’ itineraries with creative analyses of the tensions that undergird the rewriting of space. He examines a vast corpus of texts that includes Michel de Montaigne's Journal de voyage, Joachim du Bellay’s Regrets, and Jacques de Villamont’s Voyages as well as lesser-known and anonymous travel accounts of the French experience in Italy. In his readings, Keatley traces how the creation of these “textual spaces” allowed travelers to transform territories lost to France through warfare into spaces of desire, forming what Pierre Bourdieu calls symbolic capital, which was used in an ongoing commerce within the French political landscape.By highlighting the political and militaristic origins of leisure excursions, Textual Spaces contributes to our understanding of travel’s dual nature and invites the modern reader to examine the exploitative origins of tourism. Linking the fields of literary and cultural studies, history and art history, and spatial and landscape theory, it provides an engaging vision into the early history of travel that will interest historians, literary scholars, and anyone keen to understand why we venture abroad.

“Textual Spaces is the product of patient, sound, and thorough scholarship that mobilizes a wealth of source material to paint a vivid picture of the careerism, culture, and curiosity of early modern French travelers to Italy. Keatley has made an original and important contribution to the field of Renaissance studies and to the subfield of travel studies.”—Eric M. MacPhail, author of Dancing Around the Well: The Circulation of Commonplaces in Renaissance Humanism, “This study illuminates early French travels to Italy from a myriad of angles: linguistic, political, historical, biographical, medical, and architectural. At the same time, it explores outward, linking historical materials to questions of leisure, militarism, and global tourism. Advancing the notion of ‘performed leisure,’ Keatley smartly situates French travel within a rich context of political, social, economic, and learned textual impulses. His study of Montaigne’s voyage, in particular, proves a tour de force.”—George Hoffmann, author of Reforming French Culture: Satire, Spiritual Alienation, and Connection to Strangers, “Textual Spaces is a valuable resource for readers interested in a wide variety of aspects of the Renaissance—literary, art historical, and broadly cultural. It will surely stimulate and facilitate further research in its field.”—John D. Lyons, Modern Philology

Richard E. Keatley is an independent scholar from Tucker, Georgia.