During the later nineteenth and for much of the twentieth century, the history of travel was considered in the main as uplifting, entertaining, and/or consoling reading for armchair would-be voyagers or retired merchants, soldiers, and colonial administrators. Starting in 1846, for example, the Hakluyt Society kept gentlemen's club libraries supplied with a steady stream of scholarly editions of travel narratives. Although mined for instructive information with considerable success for such classic works as Boies Penrose's Travel and discovery in the Renaissance (1952) and Margaret T. Hodgen's Early anthropology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (1964), it has only been relatively recently that scholars have attended to the properties of travel writing as a genre, and to its importance not only for the history of exploration and empire but also for the history of political ideas and the emergence of modernity itself. One of the most thoughtful historians associated with this cultural turn in the study of travel writing has been the Catalan scholar, Joan-Pau Rubiés, who teaches at the London School of Economics. Together with Jas Elsner, he co-edited an important collection of essays, Voyages and visions: towards a cultural history of travel (1999) and the following year saw the publication of his landmark monograph: Travel and ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European eyes, 1250–1625 (2000). This volume collects together his most important essays published between 1991 and 2005. It is to be particularly welcomed owing to the fact that several of the essays previously appeared in out of the way publications. For Rubiés, travel literature is a ‘genre of genres’ which should be capacious enough to encompass ambassadorial and missionary reports, on the one hand, together with merchants' diaries and fully blown cosmographies, such as the Jesuit Giovanni Botero's widely translated treatise: Relationi universali (1591–5), on the other. Central to such literature was the first-person, common-sense observer who seems to have been peculiar to the Western tradition. The accompanying transformation in the ways of seeing and reporting was no less important than that of ways of reading and debating. Travel literature became, according to Rubiés, one of the more obviously empirical discourses of the early modern period. As he puts it suggestively: ‘rather than Burckhardt's “discovery of the world” what we have here is the “discovery of how to describe the world”’. Indeed, Rubiés directly associates the enormous explosion of travel writing with an ethnographic impulse that went far beyond any Greek, Latin, Arab, Persian, or Chinese precedents and parallels. In contrast to the majority of their nineteenth-century successors, ambassadors such as Sir Thomas Rowe (1581–1644) or Sir Paul Rycaut (1629–1700) gave assessments of the Mughal and Ottoman polities, respectively, which extensively acknowledged their strengths and virtues, by means of which they commented upon, in not always flattering ways, the values of their home societies. In this way, Rubiés believes ‘the language of civilization gained a space independent from the language of Christianity’. In the case of the Portuguese adventurer, Ferñao Mendes Pinto (c. 1514–83), whose Peregrinaçam was published posthumously in 1614 and widely translated, critics have been mistaken to judge it in terms of its factual accuracy. Instead, argues Rubiés, we need to consider how it works as a literary construct; a process that locates the work closer to the autobiographical fiction of Don Quixote than to the travellers' tales of Marco Polo. In another essay, Rubiés suggestively refers to the ‘magic realism’ of much travel literature inspired by the New World and argues for the need for us, as cultural historians, to acknowledge fully ‘the apparent contradictions between the rhetoric of triumphant imperialism … and the ambivalence of the actual encounter with an indigenous world, human and natural, which was neither passive nor homogenous’. The ‘connotations of the marvellous’ changed in the narratives of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Cabeza de Vaca, and Lope de Aguirre, in which the New World was ‘systematically mapped and rapidly traversed, furiously described and violently subjected to dominion’. One of the many strengths of Rubiés's account of this ‘genre of genres’ is his awareness of that ‘lost continent’ of travel literature: the unpublished accounts which still gather dust in archives. One of these is that by the Jesuit missionary martyr, Antonio Rubino, whose account of Hinduism in Southern India dates from 1608 and which Rubiés transcribes and publishes here for the first time. To date, Rubino's excruciating death at the hands of his Japanese torturers has eclipsed his contribution as a pioneer ethnographer. It was this missionary's blurring of the distinction between civil and religious ceremonies that his more famous confrères, Roberto de'Nobili and Matteo Ricci, had artificially maintained in order to justify their policy of cultural accommodation, which consigned his work to archival oblivion. The concept of cultural dialogue associated with the Jesuits is also the subject of a nuanced and important article in which Rubiés argues that an unintended consequence of the Jesuit conversion strategy of accommodation was to show how ultimately morality had a rational, rather than a religious, foundation. They thereby fatally compromised their missionary purposes and ‘contributed to the emergence of a powerful concept of rational civilization which was increasingly independent from theological definitions’. Taken together, these sometimes densely argued, but always richly rewarding, essays fulsomely realize their ambitious objective, which is to show nothing less than how ‘travel writing decisively contributed to the transformation of European culture towards the concerns of the Enlightenment’. They promise well indeed for Rubiés's forthcoming study, Europe's new worlds: travel writing and the origins of the Enlightenment, 1550–1750.