Borders and Travellers in Early Modern Europe (review)

Border studies have become a growth area in the United States. Literary and feminist scholars, without directly addressing the arguments advanced, have taken to quoting Étienne Balibar, the French Marxist philosopher, Althusser's disciple, and André Green the French Freudian psychologist, both of whom are concerned with modern issues of states and citizenship who change the meaning and focus given the term border. Balibar argues that 'border areas – zones, countries, and cities – are not marginal to the constitution of a public sphere but rather are at the center'. Earlier anthropologists had wider uses for the term. Van Gennep called it a transition state, Victor Turner 'a sort of neutral zone, an area of becoming, often marked by rites of passage'. Liminality, threshold, edge, are all aspects of a border and were widely recognized in Early Modern Europe as moments of alteration in both physical and spiritual life. Some of the chapters in this volume examine the lines between life and death, health and sickness, food and nausea, acceptance and rejection. Each is largely independent and there is little internal referencing.

In some ways this volume is also a reflection on Andrew Hadfield's study of travel writing, an idea reinforced by Hadfield's Afterword that wonders whether cannibals had a Renaissance. Hadfield has previously argued that some travel writings were really designed as commentaries on contemporary English politics; this volume includes chapters that assume as much. It is a collection of chapters mainly written by literary scholars on various forms of travel and liminality. Dr Betteridge in his introduction attempts to make some general, thought-provoking (but largely unsupported) claims about the nature of the sixteenth-century border, particularly the physical border. But, as so often happens, the other chapters are not constructed in a way that addresses his propositions.

A border can be seen as both excluding and including, an idea that Neil Whitehead, an anthropologist and authority on areas of South America, employs in examining Walter Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana and Hans Staden's Warhaftige Historia for their presentation of cannibalism which he sets in a brief but nuanced representation of the situation in South America at the time they wrote. He does, however, think that Ralegh is using his writing to reflect on politics at home and that Staden is relating cannibalism to the debate on the eucharistic sacrifice. Turning this approach inside out, Maria R. Boes, who has already written on the introduction of exclusionary practices by the Frankfurt guilds and the way in which this created internal boundaries elsewhere, adds to this a consideration of the concept of border as a term, which she claims only arose in the sixteenth century when new mapping initiatives appeared. While this seems to ignore long established ideas about the Marches, it raises interesting points about representation in a changing world. Melanie Ord, in looking at Sir Henry Wotton, also sees the traveller as more concerned with the country from which he comes, with the problems of his return, the use or concealment of his time away and with the exile looking back while away. Wotton's nomination as Provost of Eton when he was recalled from Venice (presumably, as the statutes required it, this is why in 1627 he is aiming to take Holy Orders) she sees as a career move that was linked by the similarity of the pre-occupations of the two life-styles but must then explain the modest part reflections on his time as a traveller play in Wotton's later writings. Oddly, she does not refer to Gerard Curzon's recent life of Wotton.

Claire Jowitt, looking at an aspect of the well-worn topos of piracy, touches on the notion of the claims that land-based states might make to the sea, but her focus is narrower. Her key text is a surviving broadsheet issued after the execution of Thomas Walton alias Purser and Clinton Atkinson for...