Abstract

Sir Anthony Sherley was an Elizabethan and Stuart traveler and adventurer who served a notable number of statesmen in Europe and Persia between 1587 and circa 1630. During the last stage of his life, and after becoming a Catholic, he settled in Spain and wrote in Spanish two political and economic reports addressing Spain’s global role in the world. These two texts, which shed some light on the last stage of Sir Anthony’s life and on the nature of Anglo-Spanish relations during the reigns of King James and Kings Philip III and Philip IV, help us understand the complex figure of Sir Anthony and his participation in what we may call the global early modern—that is, the new cosmopolitanism that made seventeenth-century England and Spain engage with imagined and real worlds elsewhere.

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