In 1641, John Taylor, a Thames waterman and poet, struggled over how best to describe his tour through England's rivers, referring to his “travell, Joruney [sic], Voyage, Perambulation, and Perigrination, or what you please to call it” (p. 220). The difficulty arose because in early modern England to “travel” generally meant to leave the nation: domestic mobility was viewed as a threat to social stability in a world where, ideally, everyone knew his or her place. In this valuable work, Andrew McRae argues that between about 1550 and 1700 people attempted to conceptualize and legitimize travel within England, and in doing so, created a new concept of nationhood “founded upon and enacted through instances of individual mobility” (236).

McRae focuses on how literature participated in this change, and one of his book's main strengths is the breadth of his literary sources, ranging from pamphlets, broadsides, and maps to Drayton and Evelyn. The study is divided into two sections, the first examining the structures, both natural and artificial, that permitted travel, and the second looking at particular travelers. In chapters on rivers, roads, and inns and alehouses, McRae argues that anxieties over changing economic structures were expressed in discourse on domestic mobility. The discussion of how abstract “ways” became concrete and mappable “roads” is particularly strong, exploiting excellent recent scholarship on the creation of a national postal system and the improvement of stagecoach routes.

In the book's second section, McRae uses the records of royal progress entertainments to further bolster an argument he proposed in 2004 in his Literature and Satire and the Early Stuart State. In that volume McRae challenged Habermas' vision of the late-seventeenth-century development of the English public sphere, detecting a multiplicity of public spheres forming in Elizabeth's reign. Similarly, in the present volume's chapter on “traffic” (the early modern term for internal trade), McRae finds watermen-poets capable of both “authorial self-fashioning” (222) and self-conscious observation about travel opening up the nation to new industries.

McRae's arguments are chronological. He finds in early modern travel journals a new category of self-described tourists struggling to legitimize personal travel without recourse to pilgrimage. However, tabular itineraries of distances, observation of the laboring poor as a curiosity, and the almost obsessive emphasis on food and consumption, as well as other factors that suggest to McRae an unprecedented conception of mobility, can be readily found in late medieval pilgrimage accounts. Still, we must welcome a book that contains such valuable critiques of recent scholarship in economic, tourism, and landscape history, and shows such multidisciplinary engagement with varied sources. It demonstrates that early modern domestic travel holds great potential for historical research.