I had been looking forward to reading this book immensely, and it certainly does not disappoint. Published as the inaugural volume of Ashgate’s new series Cultures of Play, 1300–1700, the concept of serio jocum (serious play) is explored in relation to the late Elizabethan and Jacobean English fashion for “madde voiages” (the term is taken from William Rowley’s A Search for Money [1609]). Parr’s learned book reveals both the depth and range of these eccentric travel stunts — such as Will Kemp’s 1600 morris dance to Norwich or the Gray’s Inn students’ penchant for undertaking a “Journey backward” in the 1590s, later described in the Gesta Grayorum (1688, 29) — and places them against their classical and medieval antecedents. The main achievement of Renaissance Mad Voyages is not merely a documentary one in bringing to light neglected accounts; its real value lies in Parr’s spectacular analysis of the cultural work of wise fooling. Quoting Douglas Duncan, such serious play offers a device “not so much to distinguish heresy from dogma, the false from the true, as to recognize the complexity of truth” (28). Thus, Parr suggests, mad voyages offer audiences and readers “a new kind of satire” where playfulness reveals “new ways of appraising the social and moral problems facing sixteenth-century Europe” (27).

These are big claims for what is a relatively small subgenre of travel writing, especially when compared to, for example, the ample scope and significance of Richard Hakluyt’s compendious travel collection The Principal Navigations (1589; rev. ed. 1598–1600); they are, however, fully justified in this eloquent and incisive account. After a contextual introductory chapter (“A Very English Journey?”), which includes a particularly fine analysis of the cultural cross-currents of the Ship of Fools, there follows a further five chapters, all beautifully written. Mad voyages are explored as “social phenomenon” in chapter 2, “Strange Returns and Performances,” and in chapter 3, “Two Prodigious Feats,” they are analyzed by focusing on the key examples of Kemp’s dance and William Bush’s bizarre 1607 journey in a pinnace by “Ayre, Land, and Water” (Anthony Nixon, A True Relation of the Travels of M. Bush [1608], title page), which also furnishes the book’s striking cover illustration. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on wager journeys, first discussing what they tell us about the concept and development of risk management, then how the private wager sits against the broader trajectory of English travel abroad, before turning to explore how the rich variety of wager types (often most fully revealed in records of court cases and other disputes over money) “helped to shape the experience of travel in the period” (147), especially through analyzing the wager journeys of “the most celebrated English tourist of his day,” Thomas Coryat (165).

The final chapter, “Orpheus in the Underworld,” examines the “counter-voyage” (188) in Jacobean writing, looking at the ways travel exploits and the wager economy figure in narratives of roguery. It concludes with a commanding analysis of diabolical and burlesque travel tales to hell and back in Ben Jonson’s “On the Famous Voyage,” which describes a perilous boat trip up the Fleet Ditch as a result of a tavern wager. Parr suggests that Jonson uses this satiric and sardonic “troublesome epigram” (182) to “question his culture’s direction of travel” (205) by revealing the “conflicted priorities of Jacobean society” (206). The book’s afterword is both summative and suggestive, usefully addressing broader issues of what is culturally at stake in Renaissance mad voyages and their descendants, before offering a challenge to new generations of critics to provide “an authoritative study of the tradition of speculative voyage literature in English that stretches from More’s Utopia . . . [to] the eighteenth-century flood of ‘Gulliveriana’” (214).

As should, I hope, be apparent by now, this book is a tour de force. It is rich in detail, fresh in material, sophisticated and erudite in conception, and mature and judicious in expression: the superlatives could go on. It is also lavishly produced and illustrated, including eight black-and-white and five color plates. It is a must read for all those interested in how travel writing speaks to and shapes human cultures and will quickly become a go-to resource for specialists in a wide-range of disciplines. Because of Parr’s lightness of touch and his ability to tell a good story, it should appeal well beyond the usual academic monograph readership. I hope the publisher enters it for consideration for book prizes: it would get my vote.