This article focuses on almanac travel diaries, exploring both how and why seventeenth-century English readers used books of time as books of space. It seeks to broaden studies in early modern travel writing by examining the unique, nonnarrative marginalia that typify the almanac genre. As domestic travel writers, seventeenth-century almanac users such as Lady Isabella Twysden and Anthony Wood were remarkably uninterested in discourses of nationhood or the paradigm of self/other so widely featured in other genres of travel writing. Instead, the unique structural arrangement of the almanac page as well as the almanac’s integration of spatial and temporal systems of measurement produced a distinctive style of travel notation. Both the form and content of these marginalia, I suggest, highlight an additional, understudied discourse of mobility in the early modern period, one that is shaped less by tales of encounter and discovery than by systems of placement and tabulation.
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Research Article|
May 01 2013
Travel in Time: Local Travel Writing and Seventeenth-Century English Almanacs
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2013) 43 (2): 419–443.
Citation
Laura Williamson Ambrose; Travel in Time: Local Travel Writing and Seventeenth-Century English Almanacs. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 1 May 2013; 43 (2): 419–443. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-2082023
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