The history of early modern travel is captured in its volatile and evolving literature. From the middle of the 1400s, what had been for centuries a travel literature of pilgrimage to the Holy Land underwent two "modernizations" in rapid succession. The first, in the wake of Gutenberg, was the casting or recasting of pilgrims' accounts in the new medium of print. By the waning of the fifteenth century, such printed literature had reconfirmed and enhanced long-distance pilgrimage as the primary narrative of European travel. The second, forged by the great discoveries and reformations of the...
The history of early modern travel is captured in its volatile and evolving literature. From the middle of the 1400s, what had been for centuries a...