Gender Stereotyping in Early Modern Travel Writing on Holland

This article challenges the use of British seventeenth-century travel writing on Holland as historical evidence, especially with regard to passages concerning Dutch women's independence. Two British travelers' accounts illustrate the complexities of employing travel literature to fill out the historical record: Fynes Moryson's Itinerary and Owen Felltham's Brief Character. Stuart royalist ideology and patriarchalist gender assumptions inform both texts. In addition, Moryson's Itinerary consists of intertextual pastiche; Felltham's Brief Character invokes the conventions of the Theophrastan character. Failing to understand travel accounts' status as discursive medium leads to acquiescing naïvely to their strategies of mimetic literary representation.