The Wings of Active Thought

Abstract

In the first section of this chapter, I consider anti-travel polemics and an important strand of early modern travel writing which has only recently begun to receive sustained critical attention: the ars apodemica (or ‘instructions for travel’) treatises. I attempt to establish the propensity for travel to be enjoyable for early moderns by examining the converse position: the moral opposition to travel, as articulated in anti-travel tracts and denied in ars apodemica treatises. At stake is more than a superficial objection to styles of clothing and mannerisms; it is a question of identity, in which cross-dressing, dressing above one’s rank, or affecting Italianate or Frenchified manners was both deceptive and (more alarmingly) destabilising, because constitutive of selfhood.