Travel and Conflict in the Early Modern World

This edited collection examines the meeting points between travel, mobility, and conflict to uncover the experience of travel – whether real or imagined – in the early modern world. Until relatively recently, both domestic travel and voyages to the wider world remained dangerous undertakings. Physical travel, whether initiated by religious conversion and pilgrimage, diplomacy, trade, war, or the desire to encounter other cultures, inevitably heralded disruption: contact zones witnessed cultural encounters that were not always cordial, despite the knowledge acquisition and financial gain that could be reaped from travel. Vast compendia of travel such as Hakluyt’s Principla Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries, printed from the late sixteenth century, and Prévost's Histoire Générale des Voyages (1746-1759) underscored European exploration as a marker of European progress, and in so doing showed the tensions that can arise as a consequence of interaction with other cultures. In focusing upon language acquisition and translation, travel and religion, travel and politics, and imaginary travel, the essays in this collection tease out the ways in which travel was both obstructed and enriched by conflict.

Travel and Conflict in the Early Modern World is a rich, wide-ranging and genuinely fascinating collection of essays, with contributions from across a range of disciplines. It will become standard reading for anyone interested in travel or travel writing - its modes, challenges, innovations and social and political dimensions - in the global Renaissance. Jane Grogan, Associate Professor, University College DublinEarly modern travel was a risky business, exposing those undertaking it to physical and mental dangers. Simultaneously, however, travel provided novel opportunities for complex negotiations and stimulating cultural encounters. The varied and overlapping connections between conflict and travel, real and imagined, and what they meant, are the focus of this thought-provoking collection of essays by leading scholars. Ranging across spaces, genres, modes, and geo-polities, the self-reflexive and creative uses of the conflicts travel engendered amongst those undertaking it provide a fascinating lens to explore early modern power dynamics in a number of dimensions. Claire Jowitt, Associate Dean and Professor of Renaissance Studies, University of East AngliaEach individual essay in this collection is impressive in its own right, but taken all together, they constitute a volume that is significantly greater than the sum of its parts. From the perils of travel to the perils that enforced travel, from real to imagined mobility that span real and imagined geo-political spaces, this is an ambitious and extraordinarily varied collection that demands attention from anyone interested in early modern travel, and in travel writing in general.Nandini Das, Professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture, University of Oxford.

Gábor Gelléri is Lecturer in French at Aberystwyth UniversityRachel Willie is Reader in Early Modern Literary Studies at Liverpool John Moores University