Travel and Wonder in the Early Modern World

This collection of chapters explores wonder in the context of early modern travel and travel writing, offering multifaceted and novel interpretations of the problematic relationship between a traveller and their unfamiliar environment through various geographical, chronological and thematic lenses. Exploring representations, descriptions and uses of the unfamiliar, the contributors discuss and elucidate rhetorical, epistemological, religious, colonial, materialistic and emotional aspects of wonder in the early modern world. They study European travellers and their texts, as well as descriptions of wonder within the Muslim world and reactions to the unfamiliar reported by Muslim travellers in Europe. The collection ranges from travellers' descriptions of wonder to an analysis of wonders that have travelled. With its focus on "wonder" in the context of early modern travel, this volume fills a significant gap in research, shedding new light on the history of intercultural encounters and on the processes of learning about the world and our place in it. The book is aimed at both academic and non-academic readers, for experts who study early modern history and travel writing, and for lay readers who are curious about the history of travel and about past conceptions of the world and foreign cultures.

Jaska Kainulainen is a Docent of the History of Ideas at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He is the author of Paolo Sarpi: A Servant of God and State (2014) and Early Jesuits and the Rhetorical Tradition (2024), along with multiple articles and book chapters.

1. Introduction: Ways of Seeing and Reporting Wonder 2. Taming Wonder Through Ekphrasis: Florida and Europe, 1542 and 1605 3. A Country for Old Men?: Wondrous Gerontocracy in Sir Walter Ralegh's The Discoverie of Guiana 4. Wonders Travelling from China: Examples from the Settala Collection 5. Evliya Çelebi in Egypt: Self-Fashioning and the Creation of the Wondrous 6. Explaining Wonders: Kashmir in the Voyages of François Bernier 7. From Strange to Familiar: Ottoman Eyes in Paris in the Eighteenth Century 8. Wonders and Curiosities: Early Modern British Impressions of Bohemia 9. Reducing and Othering Wonder: The Work of John Green and Abbé Prévost 10. Wonders of the Night: Nocturnal Darkness as a Sensory Experience 11. Columbus, Travel and Wonder: A Decolonial Reading from Latin American Marvelous Real