The Information Economy of Early Modern Travel Writing

England’s relations with European states were mediated through an information economy that depended not only on credential extraterritorial agents but also the illicit labor of individual travelers and other informants. The earliest forms of English travel writing emerged out of this context of the state’s networks of intelligence gathering. As described in the opening section, most travel texts from this period were not autobiographical accounts of personal travel but rather advice texts—often written by leading state officials—that outlined procedures for organizing the experience of travel and converting it into narrative form. After an initial section surveying travel advice texts of the Elizabethan period, the chapter analyzes the influence of this tradition on the practices of writing and narrative forms of the first-person travel accounts of Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary (1617) and Thomas Coryat’s Crudities (1611).