Itinera Domestica. Exploring the English Countryside through the Eyes of the Academic in 16th and 17th- Century Neo-Latin Texts

Abstract

The article introduces a group of Neo-Latin travel poems to the English countryside from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which have received little scholarly attention. It can be classified within a sub-genre of early modern travel literature, the journey poem. Richard Eedes was the first to write an Iter Boreale, and several seventeenth-century academics followed in his footsteps. The poems – and one prosimetrum – are connected to Hodoeporica which were written all over Europe at the time, but they remain sui generis. They are poetic accounts of journeys through the then scarcely travelled English countryside; they stem from an academic context, with almost all affiliated with the university of Oxford; and they emulate ancient travel poems, such as Horace’s Iter Brundisinum, while also being a serious account of the scholars’ encounter with what was largely unknown to their readers: the English countryside, particularly the North, its inhabitants, monuments and, most innovatively, its landscape.