A-Garden-of-Crisscrossing-Paths-Review-of-Travel-Narratives-the-New-Science-and-Literary-Discourse-1569-1750-Judy-A-Hayden-ed-Ashgate-2012-_2014_Endea.pdf

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Book Review
Endeavour
Vol. 38 No. 3–4
Full text provided by
www.sciencedirect.com
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A Garden of Crisscrossing Paths: Review of Travel Narratives, the New Science, and Literary Discourse, 1569–1750, Judy A. Hayden (ed.),
Ashgate, 2012.
Iordan Avramov
Institute for the Study of Societies and Knowledge, The Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, 4 Serdica Street, Sofia 1000, Bulgaria
In early modern times, they had a shortcut to entering both
scientific and literary worlds. It was simple: all that was
needed was to pick up and read a book of travels and the
reader would often be exposed to the stratagems and
products of literary imagination as well as the practices
and results of the emerging new science. Yet, readers of
literary texts could also find the influence of trendy science
and the latest travel adventures, while readers of scientific
treatises could trace facts and ideas back to those same
books of travel and literature, old and new. Surely, it was
not always that science, literature and travel intercon-
nected, but when they did, their interaction was so complex
that the three domains would look rather unified. They
would resemble not separate groves connected by long-
distance roads, but rather one and the same garden with
crisscrossing paths forming a mesh of busy exchanges.
The collection of papers under review here is the result
of the combined efforts of eleven scholars who set out to
explore the look of this garden in early modern England.
The variety of their contributions reflects the complexity of
the interplay between science, travel, and literature. To
begin with, there was the new science’s effort to shape
travellers’ observations directly; this was best exemplified
by the early Royal Society of London’s instructions for
observers of natural history. Daniel Carey finds precedents
to these observational questionnaires in various historical
settings, from the sixteenth-century Spanish Empire to the
works of visionaries like Francis Bacon and Samuel Har-
tlib, while Jason Pearl analyses a couple of them to claim
that they were meant to quantify, objectify and naturalize
the distant lands in preparation for colonial expropriation.
In his
A Tour Thro’ the whole Island of Great Britain
(1724–26) Daniel Defoe was already fully prepared to
naturalize what previous authors had proclaimed to be
geographical ‘wonders’; instead, as Jessy Edwards shows,
Defoe revelled in the new wonders of commercial and
economic progress. Yet, scientific observation did not al-
ways command an absolute power over travellers in the
period. For example, Geraldine Barnes detects an influ-
ence by the traditional lore on the monstrosity in the
descriptions of the natives of New Holland, which William
Dampier gave in his
A Voyage to New Holland
(1703).
The new science also inspired the literary world in a
range of genres, from satire to ‘science fiction’. As Marcia
Nichols shows, geographical descriptions of foreign lands
became an object of satire in the erotic pamphlet
A New
Description of Merryland
(1740) by Thomas Stretzer, while
Howard Marchitello describes how speculations about life
on the Moon in the wake of Galileo’s discoveries became a
matter of serious consideration in John Wilkins’s
Discovery
of a World in the Moon
(1638). And natural philosophy was
certainly implicated in fleshing out characters and ideas in
Margaret Cavendish’s
Blazing World
(1668), although
Holly Faith Nelson and Sharon Alker choose to also focus
on the role of Cavendish’s war memories in the composition
of her book.
It is a good sign of synergy in a collective volume when
its papers present similar issues for consideration. For
example, Julia Schleck argues that the aristocratic authors
of travel reports were sometimes suspected to be unreliable
witnesses, because their accounts could be tainted by self-
interest; in contrast, merchants commanded more contem-
porary trust in this regard, because of their standardized
system of reporting. When Judy Hayden discusses Aphra
Behn’s
Oroonoko: Or, the Royal Slave
(1688), she also
focuses on the contemporary doubts that certain actors -
this time, women - could fully engage with the ‘masculine’
natural philosophy. Concern with gender is echoed in the
papers by Marcia Nichols and Nelson & Alker, while the
focus on ‘wonder’, so central in Edwards’ text on Defoe,
surfaces again in reference to the kindred topic of curiosity
when Barbara Benedict discusses the interplay between
the collecting of scientific objects and the writing of travel
narratives as collections of observations and experiences.
With so many points of resonance among the authors, the
synthetic introduction by Judy Hayden must have been
made much easier and is, indeed, a job neatly done.
There are no serious flaws with this book. Perhaps the
authors could have benefited from more work with manu-
script sources, given that the only paper in the volume that
seriously engages with manuscripts is Barnes’s text on
Dampier. For example, not all of the Royal Society’s queries
for natural history were printed, and the archives of the
Society contain material that was deployed via manuscript
correspondence networks. But this is just an indication that
scholars are yet to fully walk the pathways of the over-
lapping realms of science, travel and literature in early
modern England. In the meantime, the present volume is
a good example of how fruitful a combination of historians
and literary scholars could be in pursuing such research.
Corresponding author:
Avramov, I. (iavramov@yahoo.com)
Available online 24 October 2014.
www.sciencedirect.com
0160-9327/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2014.09.006

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