Introduction: on reading arts of travel

Summary

Discussions around whether travel is necessary, and how to perform it correctly, are one of the most distinctive early modern forms of intellectual and literary expression when it comes to the question of mobility. The present work focuses on the particular iteration of this debate within eighteenth-century France. This corpus has received, to date, relatively little scholarly attention; I will seek to explain its popularity and its significance, and the particular place it occupies within what is a long-established genre of advice literature: ars apodemica.

Seneca's moral letters to Lucilius (c. 62–65 CE) contain one of the earliest examples of what could be called an elaborate ‘philosophy of travel’. Within letter CIV, ‘On Care of Health and Peace of Mind’, Seneca first warns that our expectations regarding the benefits of travel should be limited: travel provides ‘no restraint upon pleasure, no bridling of desire, no checking of bad temper, no crushing of the wild assaults of passion, no opportunity to rid the soul of evil. Travelling cannot give us judgement, or shake off our errors; it merely holds our attention for a moment by a certain novelty, as children pause to wonder at something unfamiliar.’ (13) Travel thus seems of no discernible use, unable to provide anything remotely resembling ‘care of health and peace of mind’. However, Seneca adds a brief comment: ‘Indeed, as long as you are ignorant of what you should avoid or seek, or of what is necessary or superfluous, or of what is right or wrong, you will not be travelling, but merely wandering.’ (16) This is a grudging admission that there might be a ‘correct’, albeit elusive, way of travelling, as opposed to mere wandering, which is useless and potentially dangerous. And the goal is clear: ‘What travel provides,’ according to Seneca, ‘is familiarity with other nations.’ (15)

Seneca's works, including this letter, were well known in early modern Europe. Through the influence of philosophers such as Justus Lipsius and Montaigne they form a cornerstone for the emerging genre of ‘theory of travel’ or ‘art of travel’ in the mid-sixteenth century.