Shakespeare's Europe revisited: the unpublished Itinerary of Fynes Moryson (1566-1630)

Kew, Graham David (1995). Shakespeare's Europe revisited: the unpublished Itinerary of Fynes Moryson (1566-1630). University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

This thesis consists of a transcript and edition of Fynes
Moryson's unpublished Itinerary c.1617 - 1625, with
introduction, text, annotations, bibliography and index.
Moryson was a gentleman traveller whose accounts of
journeys undertaken in the 1590s across much of Europe as
far as the Holy Land in the Ottoman Empire provide
contemporary evidence of secular and religious
institutions, ceremonies, customs, manners, and national
characteristics.
The first part of Moryson's Itinerary was published in
1617. Some of the second part was transcribed in 1903 by
Charles Hughes as Shakespeare's Europe, but this is the
first transcript and edition of the whole manuscript.
The work has involved investigation of the historical,
classical and geographical sources available to Moryson, of
Elizabethan secretary hand, and of travel writing as a form
of primitive anthropology. Moryson emerges as a subjective
observer full of the political and religious preconceptions
of the age, capable of acute insight but often unsystematic
and unscientific in the assembly and presentation of his
information.