Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560-1613 (review)

In his analysis of travel writers of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean age, Jonathan Sell joins a now substantial group of historians and literary scholars attracted to the topics of wonder, marvels, monsters, travel writing, and the rhetoric of empire. Sell invokes the concept of consensual truth, arguing that travel writers needed to find "words to express new things which have no previous textual existence, in such a way that the reader may enter into cognition of them" (3). Sell argues that because readers were unable to assent to anything that did not coincide with the current belief system, it was the task of the writer to make the new acceptable and the unfamiliar familiar by utilizing rhetorical devices and strategies commonly associated with fictional productions. Thus the incorporation of fictional creatures by Raleigh and Hariot was designed to create a mood, rather than to actually describe the external world. Anthony Sherley's description of Persia used rhetorical invention to make Persia's despotic ruler acceptable to English readers while Edward Hayes's description of Newfoundland was designed to show that Newfoundland was not as bad as rumor had it. He also suggests that a supposedly factual description of Virginia made extensive use both of the hyperbole of abundance and the familiar idealized concept of a golden age, techniques commonly employed by fiction writers. The use of the rhetorical topic of place in the Virginia description should not be understood as claiming verisimilitude to objective reality. In the consensual languages employed by Sell, Virginia should be thought of as an account of a paradise, not an objective report.

Although early modern readers were familiar with the principles of rhetoric, it is not clear that they believed travel accounts to be a "a feigning of . . . original wonder with the aim of inciting wonder in . . . [the] audience" (104). Although Sell emphasizes the blurring between fiction and nonfictional accounts, the distinction between them was widely accepted and often cited. The use of rhetorical devices itself would not have been taken as a sign of fictionality or the imagined by contemporary readers.

Sell also addresses the problem of assessing the credibility of travel reports. The problem was a serious one, but it was not unique to writers reporting on distant foreign locales. The same epistemological issues occurred in reporting on places and events closer to home, heroic and criminal acts, and new or unusual natural phenomena. Like travel reports, two-headed calves and conjoined twins were believable in some circumstances and not in others. Readers of reports of "matters of fact" of all kinds assessed the credibility of reporters and considered the number of witnesses.

The last two decades have witnessed an overlap in the topics of interest to historians and literary scholars. Practitioners of both disciplines are often drawn to the same texts, often with a similar attentiveness to rhetorical strategies. Benefits have accrued to both. In spite of this convergence, however, historians and literary scholars frequently talk past one another. From the vantage point of the historian, conceptual categories adopted by many literary and cultural studies scholars oversimplify. Writers and texts are classified as either hegemonic or transgressive, consensual or nonconsensual. Sell's treatment of descriptions of previously-unknown locales as consensual or nonconsensual is not very helpful, given that those categorized as nonconsensual were frequently promoted by the powerful, who did not fear that new information would undermine their power or status. New knowledge found closer to home also might challenge traditional classifications and yet be viewed by intellectual and political elites as desirable additions to the store of knowledge. Naturalists and physicians who added to and altered the store of botanical information are not usefully thought of as undermining hegemonic or consensual values. It is not clear that travel writers were, as Sell suggests, transgressive or a potential threat to the state. Nor is it obvious that travel writers manifested dissatisfaction with...