Abstract
The Bolognese traveller Ludovico de Varthema claimed to be the first European to visit Mecca and Medina, and his travels in India, especially in regions controlled by the Portuguese, were crucial in producing both the cartographic image and the material testimony that drew the first English travellers to India. His Itinerario (1510) achieved extraordinary popularity and was translated by Richard Eden for his History of Travayle (1577). Varthema also provided, for English readers, a new kind of travelling persona, an identity prone to shifts and disguises, emphasizing bodily travails, and impelled not so much by commercial or religious interests as by curiosity and the desire for novelty. Varthema’s book thus consciously places the travel narrative midway between the literature of pleasure and the literature of knowledge.
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Notes
- 1.
Among Italians mentioned are Bernardino Maffei, “surgeon to the great Mogol king,” buried in the Christian cemetery at Agra (d. 11 August 1628), and Nicolò Manucci (or Manuzzi, 1639–1717), historian of the Moghols, who died in Madras a century later.
- 2.
Purchas included Varthema’s visits to Mecca and Medina, his viewing of two “unicorns,” and his imprisonment and feigned madness.
- 3.
For Eden as secretary to Cecil, see Arber’s magisterial note (p. xxxviii): “1552. About this date, Eden was, I believe, acting as private secretary to Sir W. Cecil. I have, however, lost the reference to the authority for this.” For Eden’s intentions in translating De orbe novo decades , see Eden (1555), ‘The Epistle’ dedicatory to Philip and Mary, Sig. aiir–aivv.
- 4.
“…cosi poi che ad altro studio non me uedo essere idoneo” (Varthema 1510, Fol. vir). This concluding section of Varthema’s dedicatory epistle to Agnesina Feltria Colonna was not translated by Eden.
- 5.
- 6.
Rubiés comments “I do not know of any earlier example of a travel narrative written and printed on the traveller’s own initiative with the purpose of addressing an open market” (Rubiés 2004, p. 131, note 16).
- 7.
Boemus’ book was translated into English (without the dedication) by William Waterman as The fardle of facions (Boemus 1555).
- 8.
- 9.
“Io li rispose chio era el meglior maestro de far bombarde grosse che fusse nel mondo” (Varthema 1510, Fol. xxv–xxir).
- 10.
“… doue infinite uolte ho tolerata fame & sete: freddo & caldo: guerra: pregione: & infiniti altri pericolosi incommodi” (Varthema 1510, Fol. vir).
- 11.
Rubiés comments that “even when his reports are basically accurate, Varthema tends to dramatize situations in a literary fashion, and invents funny dialogues in a rather intuitive Arabic (in a way not dissimilar to the use of direct speech in various novelle of the period). In Portuguese India, Varthema is the most obvious precursor to Fernão Mendes Pinto, whose Peregrinaçam (1614) is obviously a literary recreation of a personal experience written as a novel” (Rubiés 2004, p. 128, note 9). Later he observes how many Renaissance novels, like those of Cervantes and Mendes Pinto, were constructed from a series of separate episodes (Rubiés 2004, p. 140, note 37).
- 12.
- 13.
“… della quale finsi de esserne molto contento, anchora che lanimo mio fusse ad altre cose intento” (Varthema 1510, Fol. lxxxixr).
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Chaudhuri, S. (2019). “Not Fit for Any Other Pursuit”: Shifting Places, Shifting Identities in Ludovico de Varthema’s Itinerario. In: Gallien, C., Niayesh, L. (eds) Eastern Resonances in Early Modern England. New Transculturalisms, 1400–1800. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22925-2_2
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