Premium
Writing the travelling self: travel and life‐writing in Peter Mundy's (1597–1667) Itinerarium Mundii
Author(s) -
Johanna Holmberg Eva
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
renaissance studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.117
H-Index - 16
eISSN - 1477-4658
pISSN - 0269-1213
DOI - 10.1111/rest.12250
Subject(s) - adventure , life writing , travel writing , history , literature , writing process , time travel , perspective (graphical) , sociology , narrative , art history , media studies , aesthetics , art , visual arts , computer science , pedagogy , artificial intelligence
This article explores the manuscript travel journal of the seventeenth century merchant adventurer Peter Mundy (d. 1667), seeking for instances of life writing amidst the hybrid forms of his textual and visual production of more than five hundred folios. It will argue that Mundy's manuscript travel journal Itinerarium Mundii, was not just a strategically selfconcealing or ‘fashioning’ text. It formed part of a life long process of accounting, editing, recording, and re‐writing, where Mundy sought not just to hide his own opinions and person, as has been sometimes claimed, but also recorded memorable events and travels, making sense of a lifetime of travels both for himself and his interested friends. This will not just provide a new perspective on Peter Mundy, but, it is hoped, encourages scholars to widen the scope of studies of early modern travel writing by opening them up for inquiries into the ways in which travelers and their ‘selves’ were embedded in, represented, and recorded in similar texts.