John Cramsie's book examines the textual engagements of early modern British travelers with “multicultural Britain.” In the early sixteenth century, encounters with new lands facilitated an ethnographic focus that was soon turned inward on Britain itself. One result was a heightened articulation of the national characters and customs of each of the three kingdoms of Wales, England, and Scotland. But Cramsie also argues that there was a growing recognition of the cultural differences within kingdoms—that is, the distinctiveness of regions, counties, pays, and especially border areas where topography, patterns of migration, and centuries of conflict had shaped complex cultures that could not be readily contained by homogenous markers of national identity. For Cramsie, such “cultural complexity” was particularly evident to travelers, who had first-hand experience with these “fluid, complex, and shifting conceptions of ethnicity (and race)” (46). One of Cramsie's main claims is that such multicultural perspectives occurred earlier and were more intense than has heretofore been recognized. The scope of British Travellers and the Encounter with Britain is therefore the two-and-a-half centuries before the eighteenth century, and especially from the 1520s to the 1690s.

Cramsie's approach is roughly chronological, with separate sections that cohere around John Leland, Fynes Moryson, and William Camden. The first section details the rise of the ethnographic approach before carefully examining Leland's 1530s and 1540s itineraries in England and Wales. Although Leland has often been pigeonholed as an Anglocentric writer, Cramsie successfully shows how he sought to celebrate a Tudor imperium that encompassed a plurality of peoples. For contemporary accounts of Scotland, the author turns to the multicultural histories of John Mair, Hector Boece, and John Lesley. This section closes by tracing how later English writers (William Harrison, William Lambarde, John Stow) appropriated Leland's descriptions in navigating Reformation religious changes.

In the second section, Cramsie moves into the seventeenth century and focuses on Fynes Moryson, a world traveler who was keenly interested in cultural complexity and who “crafted a massive cross-cultural comparison of peoples and nations right across early modern Europe” and into Asia (182). Moryson is no doubt an interesting traveler, but he does not seem to anchor his period as strongly as Leland and Camden do theirs, perhaps because of the smaller impact his “Itinerary” had on his contemporaries and the extent to which Cramsie must invoke other writers to “stand-in” for his planned but never-finished ethnography of England and Scotland. Nevertheless, Cramsie makes good use of other writers (John Taylor, William Brereton, George Owen, Richard Carew) in this section to explore how events like the accession of James VI/I and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms affected perceptions of ethnographic differences.

In the third and final section Cramsie examines Edmund Gibson's 1695 revised edition of Camden's Britannia. Gibson recruited Edward Lhuyd (Wales), Robert Sibbald (Scotland), and a host of English contributors to update and expand Camden's topographical tour of Britain. Their contributions provide “a window into the minds of late seventeenth-century scholars and travellers” (355), revealing among other things an emerging interest in natural history and a greater understanding of ethnographic complexity. Yet this section is also very much about Camden's original, which seems to emerge here as the exemplar of the early modern engagement with cultural complexity. Cramsie provides a detailed reading of Camden's lengthy and oft-overlooked “Settlement of Britain,” in which successive waves of Britons, Romans, Picts, Scots, Saxons, Danes, and Normans all encounter and leave their marks on the British landscape and its people.

Even though Leland, Moryson, and Camden are all English writers, Cramsie tries to complicate their supposed Anglocentric biases and also gives extended treatment in each section to a fruitful variety of other Welsh, Scottish, and English travelers who wrote about their own kingdoms or traveled to others. There are sections on all of the writers mentioned above as well as Gerald of Wales, Thomas Churchyard, John Aubrey, John Speed, Robert Plot, White Kennett, George Buchanan, Anthony Weldon, James Howell, Thomas Tucker, John Ray, Thomas Kirke, William Richards, and Timothy Pont. Cramsie uses these minor writers to fill in gaps and complete the picture of Britain in each section, but they also give a sense of how widespread was the early modern engagement with cultural complexity. At the same time, he traces the intellectual networks among these writers, showing that these ethnographic concerns were shared rather than isolated responses. For each writer, Cramsie gives biographical details, contextualizes the timing and scope of his travels, and provides some overall characterizations of the work. However, most of these accounts are devoted to presenting and discussing relevant passages from each work so that the reader can see firsthand what each writer encountered and how he engaged with cultural complexity. In this sense, Cramsie's book is itself a tour of early modern Britain in all its topographical and ethnographic variety.

Cramsie concludes with a “Reflection” in which he uses his findings to advocate for a more multicultural approach to British history in the national educational curricula of Wales, Scotland, and England. While Cramsie's book does reveal that many early modern travelers were aware of cultural complexity, it is not always clear that this meant that they endorsed it or valued it in the same ways that we do today. As Cramsie acknowledges, many of these travelers actually register cultural differences by reinforcing negative stereotypes (for example, Brereton, Ray, Kirke), so it may be difficult to conclude with confidence that “[t]he travellers of Tudor and Stuart Britain demand that the island's history be rewritten in a more honest and complicated manner” (515). Nevertheless, British Travellers and the Encounter with Britain, 1450–1700 does provide a thorough and varied account of the ways in which early modern travelers engaged with the cultural heterogeneity that they found in their own backyards.