The Inner Lives of Early Modern Travel

Abstract

This article assesses the role of memory, interiority, and intergenerational relations in the framing of early modern experiences and narratives of travel. It adopts as its focus three generations of the Clerk family of Penicuik, Scotland, whose travels through Europe from the mid-seventeenth century onward proved formative in the creation of varied ‘cosmopolitan’ stances within the family. While such widely studied practices as the ‘Grand Tour’ have drawn on discourses of encounter and cultural engagement within the broader narratives of the ‘long’ eighteenth century, this article reveals a family made deeply anxious by the consequences of travel, both during and after the act. Using diaries, manuscript correspondence, memoirs, and material objects, this article reveals the many ways in which travel was fashioned before, during, and long after it was undertaken. By shifting focus away from the act of travel itself and towards its subsequent afterlives, it explores the ways in which these individuals internalized what they experienced in the course of travel, how they reconciled it with the familiar, quotidian world to which they returned, and how the ‘cosmopolitan’ worldviews they brought home were made to inform the generations that followed.

Writing Mobile Lives, 1500–1700

“…It suggests we explore how travellers described their journeys while also writing themselves and their inner lives and embodied experiences into the story. This move, I argue, provides not only new rich evidence about travel in this period but also helps to show how and why mobility mattered deeply to early modern people and should thus be brought back to the mainstream of scholarly discussions of this period (Williams 2019;Gallagher 2017). Paying more attention to travel writing as a form of life writing will also help us read travel and travellers' experiences in a more nuanced way, equipped with decades of new work on mobility, life writing, and histories of embodied experience (Holmberg 2017).…”

“…In addition to Davis' Leo Africanus, Linda Colley's Elizabeth Marsh or John-Paul Ghobrial's Elias of Babylon, we also need studies of travellers whose 'travails' were perhaps less inspiring, with duller outcomes and scarcer paper trails, from the labouring poor to the servants who travelled in the entourages of princes and aristocrats, or the sailors and mariners who plundered and struggled around the globe (Davis 2006;Colley 2007;Ghobrial 2014). Only by widening our lens in this way will we gain a fuller picture of how people understood their mobility in this period (Ansell 2015;Mansell 2021;Williams 2019). Often the paper trails go cold, with exceptional or norm-challenging individuals leaving more traces of both themselves and their travels than those less exceptional, but this should not prevent scholars from setting up wider nets to catch their experiences.…”

“… Moryson, An Itinerary (1617): III. 12-13.52 For studies of mobility, where practices of recording have been centred see for exampleCorens 2018, Corens 2016Williams 2019. …”