Ashgate Variorum publications bring together a corpus of related essays, the goal being to present readers with essays that have appeared in different journals and books, and to cluster them under themes that have been central in the scholar’s work.

Travellers and cosmographers includes eleven articles that were published between 1991 and 2005 in journals that range from Portuguese Studies to History and Anthropology, from Renaissance Studies to the Journal of the History of Ideas. In two cases (articles IV and XI), Joan-Pau Rubiés took the opportunity of the Variorum format to revise his work. The collection brings to the English-reading public research conducted in Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Dutch archives. It fills an important gap for historians of the early modern world and unravels a wealth of documentary resources.

Joan-Pau Rubiés is one of the foremost writers on the history of early modern western travel, and the relation between travel, ethnography, and cosmography. In his Travel and ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European eyes, 1250–1625 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), he focussed attention on travel literature about India, showing the importance of the eastward European gaze. In this collection of essays, he turns his attention to the Americas at the same time that he continues his work on Asia. The essays are divided between ‘Historical perspectives’ (four essays) and ‘Texts and debates’ (seven essays). Rubiés sets out his theoretical and methodological apparatus, and then continues with specific case studies about individual travellers, religious groups (Jesuits), primary printed sources, and manuscripts.

It is difficult in a short review to do justice to all the essays in this collection. But, unlike many such collections where the levels of scholarship and acumen vary from one essay to another, these essays are uniformly superlative. Rubiés views travel writing as one of the factors that helped bring about the Enlightenment: despite the racism and bigotry that were expressed by writers, the diversity of peoples from America to India and Japan forced on Europeans new forms of thinking and contributed to the development of modern science, with its grounding in epistemology and empirical observation. This relationship between travel and the Enlightenment is a project that Rubiés intends to examine more fully in his forthcoming Europe’s new worlds: travel writing and the origins of the Enlightenment, 1550–1750. From Rousseau to Kant, thinkers repeatedly showed awareness of the new peoples and worlds that had come to their European attention: Rubiés undertakes a crucial project in focussing on the lineages of the ideas that became fundamental in the second part of the eighteenth century.

The essays in the ‘Historical perspectives’ unit examine the impact of specific cultures on the production of travel literature; the difference between fictional and authentic accounts; and the tension between religious authority and the ‘libertinism’ that was seen in travel descriptions – of alternative but coherent religious beliefs and customs, and of harmonious societies without the need for Christian revelation. In the opening essay, ‘New worlds and Renaissance ethnology’, Rubiés focuses on the destabilization that European travellers felt when they encountered different people: who was the norm and who was the aberration? In this context of describing foreign lands and societies, he challenges the thesis that links travel writing to empire (II, p. 158). As his essay on ‘Travel writing and ethnography’ shows, early modern writers, unlike their nineteenth-century successors, were baffled by what they saw, and portrayed peoples, courts, and cultures in a ‘nuanced’ manner (IV, p. 17).

This argument is controversial: if European travellers are compared with non-Europeans, a clear difference emerges. The first Europeans to arrive in the East or the West Indies were exploring new avenues of trade and searching for new mineral and natural resources. Once they found what they wanted, they realized that there were peoples there who would have to be confronted and perhaps forcibly dominated. The traveller, with his detailed description of communities and terrains, assumed the role of the spy as he observed, explained, and pointed out ethnic and regional fault-lines. He was followed by the theologian, who, in most but not all cases, invoked God to legitimize European conquest and its violence. The initial motivation for travel was not necessarily empire: the Iberians – and later the English, the Dutch, and the French, among others – did not know the geography, topography, or demography of the Americas. Nonetheless, a strong connection between the two runs through early European travel writings. They needed to build knowledge, which then proved instrumental in establishing power and domination. (The methodological consistency in defining travellers’ goals is carefully examined in essay III: ‘Instructors for travellers: teaching the eye to see’). This travel-cum-power motif does not appear in Islamic travellers, for instance, who described new peoples and lands without providing the groundwork for conquest. The recent works of Roxanne L. Euben, and Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, among others, are valuable in this context, but appeared after Rubiés’ publications. Whether Muslims travelled in Islamic lands (Ibn Battuta) or non-Islamic lands (Katib Chelebi), they did not see themselves as part of a ‘national’ movement into foreign regions but simply as travellers and curious wanderers in the marvellous world of God.

In ‘Texts and debates’, Rubiés ranges across the western European travel enterprise, studying specific cases of men and religious groups. He translates and comments on a letter by the Florentine Giovanni di Buonagrazia to his father in the context of other documents about Vasco da Gama’s voyage (V); the travel account of the Portuguese Mendes Pinto, which has been little examined, is given a fresh look (VI); the mixture of fact and fiction in accounts about sixteenth-century America is surveyed through the works of the (chiefly Iberian) travellers, from Oviedo to de Vaca to Aquirre (VII). In essays VIII–X, Rubiés shifts from America to the Far East and examines the work of the Piedmontese Antonio Rubino about Hinduism, providing a detailed biography of the Jesuit missionary (VIII). Essay IX is fascinating, as Rubiés focuses on the dialogue within the Jesuit movement regarding cultural accommodation of non-Christian rites in India and other spheres of missionary activity. He shows how accommodation was initially accepted but was discontinued at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Essay X surveys the Spanish ethnology of Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while the final article presents the work of the Dutch thinker Grotius and his views on the Native Americans – an important contribution given the extensive debate about this topic that dominated the seventeenth century.

Rubiés studies a wide spectrum of early modern travellers and ethnographers. Europeans were active in describing and categorizing the peoples they encountered – religiously, historically, and linguistically – and Rubiés shows the complexity in the European project, its nuance and occasional ambivalence: it was an enterprise of knowledge, which proved instrumental in empire and domination. The essays show how early modern European knowledge about the world was collected, and how it was presented, in both print and manuscript, to parents as well as to ecclesiastical and royal authorities.

Travellers and cosmographers is clearly written and widely researched. It is a treasure trove of ideas, insights, and allusions to new sources; the footnotes are extensive, revealing meticulous exploration of the European archives. The fact that the collection covers both East and West makes it required reading for students and scholars working in the field of early modern history.