Of the crowd of travelers that departed from British shores in the newly favorable circumstances of the early seventeenth century, William Lithgow would not be most scholars’ choice of subject. The Travels of William Biddulph (1609) and the Itinerary of Fynes Morrison (1617) are arguably more balanced accounts, while the “Leg-Stretcher” Thomas Coryat's relation of his travels on foot into India (reproduced in Samuel Purchas's travel compendium Purchas His Pilgrimage) is superbly idiosyncratic. George Sandys, whose True Relation of a Journey of 1615 passed through nine editions before 1673, certainly proved more influential among his contemporaries and more popular among later literary scholars and historians.

Lithgow's Peregrinations (1614), while animated by his own charmingly irascible personality, are, in contrast, “opinionated, humorless, fanatically anti-Catholic, distinctly anti-Jewish … with a voyeuristic interest in sexual depravity” (6). His lofty disdain is evident throughout this text: he predictably finds Rome and the papacy a “Babylonian whoore” (25), Istanbul “a painted Whoore” (56), and Greece “deformed” and “miserable” (37). While he appreciates Cairo as “the most admirable and greatest City, seene upon the earth,” he considers its Muslim population to be “beastly … being great Sodomites, and Diabolically given to all sorts of abhominations” (93). It is a refrain he obsessively repeats throughout and in a surprising variety of geographical locations. He further lambasts the “fantastick foolery of the French” (157), considering France merely a pale imitation of Italy, and makes an unplanned detour to revel in the execution of a Catholic priest in Dijon (108). Even by the standards of his time, when Protestant Britons routinely vented their spleen against perceived idolatry and barbarousness, Lithgow is far from open-minded.

And yet he was a man capable of generosity and good cheer, and he proves remarkably resourceful in the face of considerable adversity. Moreover, it is the scale of his wanderlust that is of particular fascination—the three voyages covered here carry him (often alone and on foot, his preferred method of travel) through southern Europe and Ottoman-controlled Greece to Istanbul and then on to the Holy Land; through North Africa and then central and eastern Europe; and finally, on the way to the mythical Ethiopian court of Prester John, into the hands of the Spanish Inquisition in Malaga. In C. E. Bosworth, Lithgow has found an extraordinarily erudite and sympathetic critic, and this book animates his circumlocutions with an encyclopedic eye for detail, a thorough knowledge of context, and a healthy skepticism regarding the extent of Lithgow's borrowings from other sources.

Like many of his contemporaries, Lithgow was by no means a random traveler and collector. He is careful to place his adventures in terms of a “science of the world,” which suggests the care with which he crafted and supplemented the texts of his travels and indeed developed those texts over two decades, between 1614 and 1632. Bosworth quotes Lithgow's explanation of this theory, a “science” that “is onely acquisted by conversation, and haunting the company of the most experimented: by divers discourses, reports, by writs, or by a lively voyce, in communicating with strangers. … And above all, and principally by Travellers, and Voyagers in divers Regions, and remote places, whose experience confirmeth the true Science thereof; and can best draw the anatomy of humane condition” (104). This indicates the extent to which Lithgow presents himself as one of those “most experimented,” mediating the dangers and excesses he encounters on the readers’ behalf while incorporating them into an explicitly Christian narrative of trial and redemption. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his account of the horrific torture he receives at the hands of the Inquisition, which, as Bosworth recognizes, involves “a considerable amount of plausible reconstruction” to satisfy “the spiritual needs of a particular audience” (169).

This process of shaping events in retrospective reconstruction is perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of Lithgow's Peregrinations, and it raises a series of questions regarding the “truth” of his account. Just as it is anachronistic to expect early modern texts to adhere to our notions of originality, the introduction of what Bosworth describes as “pardonable fiction” (169) should in no way undermine the travel accounts of Lithgow and his contemporaries. Rather, it should prompt a consideration of their imagined purpose and intended audience, as well as the nature of their sources. While Bosworth is sensitive to the potential “fictionality” of a number of episodes throughout Lithgow's travels, this aspect might have been explored further. Certainly, the text abounds with potential borrowings and repeatedly overlaps with other Elizabethan and Jacobean travel narratives, such as those of Sandys and Coryat.

Two further examples: Henry Timberlake, in his Travailes of Two English Pilgrimes (1603), like Lithgow and earlier authors, is astonished by the industrial hatching of incubated hens’ eggs in Egypt (and aware of its domestic potential). Like Lithgow, he enters Jerusalem “singing and praising God” (Timberlake, 6). Similarly, William Parry, in his relation of The Travels of Sir Anthony Sherley Knight (1603), is, like Lithgow, amazed at the use of carrier pigeons for military and commercial intelligence. Such connections are interesting not solely because they may suggest similar source material, or the borrowing of one account by another, but also what the British found interesting, useful, and worthy of comment in such distant climes.

On a different note, the remarkable complexity of the Mediterranean world is repeatedly brought to the fore, with the crossing of multiple political boundaries, the paying of a bewildering variety of taxes, the necessity of an elaborate system of credit, and the ever-present danger of robbery and piracy. Given Lithgow's character, it is perhaps remarkable he continued unscathed for so far and so long, although his passage is repeatedly eased by the multitude of Scots he encounters and by numerous renegades of different persuasions. It is to Bosworth's credit that in this informative and well-crafted volume he charts this intricate world with assurance and authority.