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.