Preliminary communication
Croatian regions in the travel narratives by Georges Sandys (1615) and William Lithgow (1632)
Marina Metelko
; Posgraduate doctoral program of Medieval Studies, Faculty of humanities and social sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The paper examines possibilities for a more detailed analytical approach to the reading of early modern European travel narratives, the authors of which describe Croatian regions on their way to the Levant. Through a comparative reading of the selected passages from two English travel accounts written by the authors who undertake journeys to the East at approximately the same time (George Sandys in 1610, William Lithgow in 1609) and traverse the same itinerary (Venice-Eastern Adriatic-Greek islands-Istanbul-Aleppo-Jerusalem), attention is drawn to an abundance of textual and contextual differences. Arguing that these differences should be examined not only against the biographic and bibliographic background of the travel narratives’ respective authors, but also in light of a specific moment in English and European intellectual history in the first decades of the seventeenth century, the readership intended for each text and the presence of these texts on the European book market during and after the lives of their authors, the paper aims to invite future readings of early modern European travel narratives from a Croatian perspective which would not be limited by its hitherto predominant focus on the description of Croatian regions.
Keywords
George Sandys; William Lithgow; early modern travel narrative; Eastern Adriatic; Istanbul (Constantinople); mythography; Humanism; Empiricism; Terence Cave; cornucopian text
Hrčak ID:
174653
URI
Publication date:
14.4.2009.
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