Overview

A broad-based and accessible anthology of travel and colonial writing in the English Renaissance, selected to represent the world-picture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers in England. It includes not just the narratives of discovery of the New World but also accounts of cultures already well known through trade links, such as Turkey and the Moluccan islands, and of places that featured just as significantly in the early modern English imagination: from Ireland to Russia and the Far East, from Calais to India and Africa, from France and Italy to the West Indies. The writings reveal painstaking attempts to understand the 'other' as well as ignorance and prejudice, surprising connections alongside phobic reactions to difference, the desire to co-operate alongside the desire to extinguish and exploit. The second edition of Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels is significantly revised and expanded, twenty years after the first edition helped to establish the field of travel and colonial writing in English. The anthology includes substantial new chapters of extracts on 'The North', detailing the important Arctic voyages and search for the elusive North-West Passage; 'Islamic West Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean', includes new material on Persia, Russia, and Jerusalem; 'England from Elsewhere' includes observations of England and the English from European travellers; and the epilogue on women travellers, explores the importance in particular of Lady Catherine Whetenhall's journey to Italy, recorded after her early death. The chapter on Africa includes new material on the Congo, Gambia, and Sierra Leone, and the chapter on East Asia and the South Seas contains new material on China and Japan. There are new images of West African figures and Sir Anthony and Lady Shirley in Persian courtly attire. The introduction has been carefully revised to take into account the wealth of scholarship on English perceptions of Asia and the Mediterranean, and the analysis of race and racial identity has been expanded in line with contemporary concerns. Headnotes and notes have been revised and expanded throughout the text. The anthology is the most comprehensive single-volume available in English, and, with its newly modernized text and reader-friendly apparatus, is designed to appeal to the general as well as the specialist reader. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of travel, colonial writing, and racial politics at the time of the first British Empire.

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9780198871576

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Reviews

"The anthology is written in an approachable, mostly jargonfree style. It is accessible for students and a wide readership, especially as each excerpt is accompanied by an opening introduction to the author and the text. I look forward to using this second edition of the anthology for teaching and other purposes in the future. * Archiv f""ur das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 260:2 *"

The anthology is written in an approachable, mostly jargonfree style. It is accessible for students and a wide readership, especially as each excerpt is accompanied by an opening introduction to the author and the text. I look forward to using this second edition of the anthology for teaching and other purposes in the future. * Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, 260:2 *

Author Information

Matthew Dimmock is Professor of Early Modern Studies at the University of Sussex. He has published widely on Tudor English engagements with the wider world and was recently Visiting Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC. He was an editor for the Norton 3 Collected Works of Shakespeare and is currently an editor on the Oxford Hakluyt and Thomas Nashe projects. Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. He has worked at the Universities of Leeds and Aberystwyth and Columbia University, New York and held visiting positions at The University of Granada, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, University College, Dublin, and All Souls College, Oxford. He was chair of the Society for Renaissance Studies (2016-9), and edited the journals, Reformation (2000-06) and Renaissance Studies (2006-11), and currently edits The Spenser Review with Jane Grogan. He is a regular reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement and is editing The Works of Thomas Nashe with Joseph Black, Jennifer Richards and Cathy Shrank.

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