Authenticating El Dorado: Frustrated Knowledge Production in Walter Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana

This article takes a fresh approach to Walter Ralegh's published account of his voyage to Guiana, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana (1596), using it as a case study through which to explore the fragility of sixteenth-century processes of knowledge production about new lands. The article revisits this famous account in order to scrutinise in more detail the types of evidence Ralegh used to support his claims that a rich and powerful empire lay ready to be conquered by the English in the Amazon. This new analysis of Ralegh's narrative highlights the continued centrality of reputational models of authority in early modern travel literature and examines the types of evidence that could be employed by writers to support their suppositions when witness testimony was lacking. Ralegh's narrative illustrates that systems of knowledge production centred on the New World were, at the end of the sixteenth century, still in a state of flux. New ideas about what constituted credible knowledge, from firsthand experience to the collection of material artefacts, competed with older frameworks of authentication and authority. By examining knowledge production in frustration, and by dissecting Ralegh's failure to present a believable vision of El Dorado, this article throws into starker relief the many pitfalls and difficulties that beset those who attempted to present new and credible knowledge about the New World.

‘I wish to be no other but as he’: Persia, masculinity, and conversion in early-seventeenth-century travel writing and drama

In classical descriptions, Persians and their rulers are seen as being given to both tyranny and femininity; early modern Europe thus inherited a view of Persia in which the performance of religious identity, political power and gender were inter-connected. Given the complex relationships between Islam, tyranny and gender, early modern European interest in the possible religious conversion of Persia and its people marks a moment at which contemporary anxieties about religious and gender identities converge. This chapter argues that European writers’ interest in the prospect of Persian conversion became tied up with their ideas about the links between Persian effeminacy and tyranny. The prospect of the conversion of Persian Shahs in early modern travel literature and drama gives rise to particular anxieties about masculinity, both in Persian figures and in the Christian European travellers and dramatists who portrayed them. Despite the tradition of viewing Persia as feminised and luxurious, the sources betray an underlying concern that Muslims’ gender and religious identities might in fact be more ‘fixed’ than those of Christian travellers, who experienced their own conversions to Islam and to Persian identities in ways that were troubling to them both as Christians and as men.

Fantasies of Immediacy, or, the Boundaries of the Book in Eighteenth Century Travel Narratives

This article explores a structural shift in techniques of representation in eighteenth-century travel literature as a reaction to the changing needs of cameralist governance, one in which space is no longer grasped as enyclopedic and all-encompassing. Instead of being understood as static territory, space is increasingly represented as a dynamic and continually updatable dataset. As a consequence, travel literature itself goes in search of new representational modes appropriate to this new understanding of space. And as I show, the medium of the book becomes increasingly problematic in this regard. As early modern travel literature (ars Apodemica) largely splits in the eighteenth century into statistics and geography on the one hand and literary travel experiences on the other, each of these categories requires new forms of mediation for their successful presentation. Common to both, however, remains a desire to communicate an immediacy of perception through representation. Taking Friedrich Nicolai’s Beschreibung einer Reise durch Deutschland und die Schweiz im Jahre 1781 as my primary example, I show how the medium of the book arrives at its own media boundary, one whose transgression necessarily results in failure because it can no longer account for an epistemological divide that has already transpired. This difference has far-reaching implications for the place of the book within the humanistic sciences today.