Inaugurating Ashgate's new series Cultures of Play, 1300–1700, Anthony Parr's Renaissance Mad Voyages: Experiments in Early Modern English Travel has been lavishly produced in large format with several color plates. The admirable aims of this series, as described by its editor, Bret Rothstein, in the book's front matter, is exploring “the history of early modern wit, humor, and games” and reconceptualizing “the play elements of early modern economic, political, religious, and social life.” Parr's title exploits the ludic openings invited by the series and by his materials; he daringly collides “Renaissance” into “early modern” with casual if not mocking indifference to those with stakes in the difference, leaving readers to surmise that the madness of that “mad” of the title will have little to do with Foucault and his kind. If this study is almost entirely a theory-free zone, Parr is an enthusiastic and deeply learned guide to the ways that early modern English travelers financed their voyages and to contemporary attitudes toward travel as a peculiarly risky and dangerous, indeed mad, thing to do.
In 1609, we learn, the phrase, “madde voiages” (4) was used to reflect on a spate of spectacular journeys, by land and sea, that had recently made news via the London press. For Parr, an illuminating example of such was a 1607 journey of one Mr. Bush, who constructed a boat that he hoisted to a church steeple by pulleys, transported overland on wheels to the Thames, and then sailed to London. This was clearly an ingenious feat of engineering—a machine that travels through air, on land, and by water—but who paid for it? In his opening chapter, Parr explains how reports celebrating such seemingly eccentric, and often strenuous, travels appeared in the 1590s and 1600s, flourishing amid diverse but fertile contemporary conditions: maritime adventuring; profit seeking; changing social conditions; new ideas about walking for pleasure and health; new interest in travel stimulated by print culture; traditional ideas of the folly of travel, of wise folly, and the Ship of Fools.
Among the English especially, Parr argues, “madde voiages” flourished amid a taste for traveling on a wager in a culture prone to gambling. Such travels often celebrated the nation's navigational and physical prowess at a time when England was emerging as a mobile and powerful maritime nation. They were, Parr tells us, symptoms of a “new world … taking shape,” one characterized by “increased mobility, opportunities, and enterprise” (6); nothing less than national self-fashioning was at stake, and the English developed a defining taste for eccentric travel that has still not left them.
In chapter 2, Parr examines some “miscellaneous evidence … about the mad voyages as a social phenomenon” (35), ranging from an account of the Grays’ Inn revels of 1595, with their elements of game and imaginary world travel, to the spectacular self-promotional journeys of would-be courtiers, the daring sea-journey of one Richard Ferris, and Ben Jonson's walk to Scotland. Fynes Moryson was not alone strenuously attacking stunt travels with their links to gambling: one core of Parr's study is an inquiry into the financing of travel by means of wagers and juridical efforts to regulate the risks and dangers—the madness, as it were—of early modern travel.
His eye seldom far from the financial question, Parr is otherwise fascinated by the materials he has found, and his subsequent chapters are “devoted to … close examination” (65) of his favorites, their intricacies, contexts, nuances. In chapter 3 he returns to Mr. Bush with a detailed contextual analysis of his journey by boat on air, land, and water, suggesting that it might have served his sponsors as a “fundraiser” for a proposed “Guiana voyage” (73). Advising that “we should be cautious,” Parr then reviews the story of Will Kemp's “famous morris dance to Norwich,” placing it amid the “enterprise culture” of the time (90, 65, 94).
In chapter 4, Parr looks overseas to explore evidence of foreign journeys being underwritten by wagers and similar financial instruments, including those that were already in place for purposes of pilgrimage and, formerly, crusade. Chancery records show that maritime adventuring was recognized to be a gamble that, irrational and mad though it might be, nevertheless came under increasing legal regulation, especially with the rise of maritime insurance. Italy and the Ottoman Empire were especially high-risk zones for English travelers. In chapter 5, Parr turns to Chancery records and legal debates over the status of financial instruments underwriting travelers; disputes concerning Thomas Coryate provide exemplary material. In the final chapter, Parr pursues wager journeys by examining literary accounts of imaginative visits to underworlds, where inversion, parody, and satire enabled debates about whether travelers were or were not frivolous risk takers.
Renaissance Mad Voyages, Parr's study of the eccentric travels of the early modern English, will inform readers and scholars of travel writing as well as cultural and literary historians concerned with questions of national self-fashioning in the era. Based on detailed contextual readings of unfamiliar as well as better-known writings of the period, Parr reveals how eccentric travel signals the radical emergence of individual identity—originality—as a complex marker of a peculiarly English aptitude for gambling, taking risky voyages that might pay off in fame or wealth but might otherwise appear to be mad.
