This book provides valuable new insights into the public debate over educational travel in early modern England, and examines the seven major images of the educational traveller and the fears and insecurities within English society that engendered them.

In 1578, the Anglo-Italian author, translator, and teacher John Florio wrote that English was 'a language that wyl do you good in England, but passe Dover, it is woorth nothing'. Learning Languages in Early Modern England is the first major study of how English-speakers learnt a variety of continental vernacular languages in the period between 1480 and 1720. English was practically unknown outside of England, which meant that the English who wanted to travel and trade with the wider world in this period had to become language-learners. Using a wide range of printed and manuscript sources, from multilingual conversation manuals to travellers' diaries and letters where languages mix and mingle, Learning Languages explores how early modern English-speakers learned and used foreign languages, and asks what it meant to be competent in another language in the past. Beginning with language lessons in early modern England, it offers a new perspective on England's 'educational revolution'. John Gallagher looks for the first time at the whole corpus of conversation manuals written for English language-learners, and uses these texts to pose groundbreaking arguments about reading, orality, and language in the period. He also reconstructs the practices of language-learning and multilingual communication which underlay early modern travel. Learning Languages offers a new and innovative study of a set of practices and experiences which were crucial to England's encounter with the wider world, and to the fashioning of English linguistic and cultural identities at home. Interdisciplinary in its approaches and broad in its chronological and thematic scope, this volume places language-learning and multilingualism at the heart of early modern British and European history.

"The essays collected in this volume explore many of the most interesting, and some of the more surprising, reactions of English people in the early modern period to their encounters with the mysterious and the foreign. In this period the small and peripheral nation of English speakers first explored the distant world from the Arctic, to the tropics of the Americas, to the exotic East, and snowy wastes of Russia, recording its impressions and adventures in an equally wide variety of literary genres. Nearer home, fresh encounters with the mysterious world of the Ottoman Empire and the lure of the Holy Land, and, of course, with the evocative wonders of Italy, provide equally rich accounts for the consumption of a reading and theatergoing public. This growing public proved to be, in some cases, naive and gullible, in others urbanely sophisticated in its reactions to "otherness," or frankly incredulous of travelers' tales."--BOOK JACKET.

Eleven essays invite us to rethink not only what constitutes an environment but also where the environment ends and selfhood begins. The essays examine the dynamic and varied mediations early modern writers posited between microcosm and macrocosm, ranging from discourses on the ecology of passions to striking examples of distributed cognition.

This edited collection examines the meeting points between travel, mobility, and conflict to uncover the experience of travel – whether real or imagined – in the early modern world. Until relatively recently, both domestic travel and voyages to the wider world remained dangerous undertakings. Physical travel, whether initiated by religious conversion and pilgrimage, diplomacy, trade, war, or the desire to encounter other cultures, inevitably heralded disruption: contact zones witnessed cultural encounters that were not always cordial, despite the knowledge acquisition and financial gain that could be reaped from travel. Vast compendia of travel such as Hakluyt’s Principla Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries, printed from the late sixteenth century, and Prévost's Histoire Générale des Voyages (1746-1759) underscored European exploration as a marker of European progress, and in so doing showed the tensions that can arise as a consequence of interaction with other cultures. In focusing upon language acquisition and translation, travel and religion, travel and politics, and imaginary travel, the essays in this collection tease out the ways in which travel was both obstructed and enriched by conflict.

This volume explores the early modern manuals on travelling (Artes apodemicae), a new genre of advice literature that originated in the sixteenth century, when it became communis opinio among intellectuals that travelling was an important means of acquiring knowledge and experience, and that an extended tour abroad was a vital, if not indispensable part of humanist, academic and political education. In this volume, the formation of this new genre, between 1550 and 1700, is studied in its historical, social and cultural context. Furthermore, the volume examines the impact of this new genre on the acquisition and collection of knowledge in the early modern period, empirical or otherwise. Contributors: Justin Stagl, Karl Enenkel, Jan Papy, Thomas Haye, Robert Seidel, Gabor Gelléri, Bernd Roling, Harald Hendrix, Jan L. de Jong, Kerstin Maria Pahl, Johanna Luggin, Marc Laureys, and Justina Spencer.

This is the first monograph to examine the complex life of the Reformed Philadelphian court preacher Conrad BrAske (1660-1713). Chapters consider his experiences as a student at Marburg University, as educational traveler, as proponent of a millenarian mindset and his conflicts with Johann Konrad Dippel and the Elberfeld Classis.

This study is about the multitude of early medieval children donated 'to God in the monastery'. It puts child oblation in the context of contemporary gift-giving practices, providing in-depth treatment of the oblation ritual and its social setting.

In the wake of England's break with Rome and gradual reformation, English Catholics took root outside of the country, in Catholic countries across Europe. Their arrival and the foundation of convents and colleges on the Continent as attracted scholarly attention. However, we need to understand their impact beyond that initial moment of change. Confessional Mobility, therefore, looks at the continued presence of English Catholics abroad and how the English Catholic community was shaped by these cross-Channel connections. Corens proposes a new interpretative model of 'confessional mobility'. She opens up the debate to include pilgrims, grand tour travellers, students, and mobile scholars alongside exiles. The diversity of mobility highlights that those abroad were never cut off or isolated on the Continent. Rather, through correspondence and constant travel, they created a community without borders. This cross-Channel community was not defined by its status as victims of persecution, but provided the lifeblood for English Catholics for generations. Confessional Mobility also incorporates minority Catholics more closely into the history of the Counter-Reformation. Long side-lined as exceptions to the rule of a hierarchical, triumphant, territorial Catholic Church, English Catholic have seldom been recognised as an instrumental part in the wider Counter-Reformation. Attention to movement and mission in the understanding of Catholics incorporates minority Catholics alongside extra-European missions and reinforces current moves to decentre Counter-Reformation scholarship.

Encounters with a 'multicultural' Britain in the Tudor and Stuart periods written with an eye to debates about immigration and ethnicity in today's Britain.