Abstract
This essay analyses some of the strategies adopted by early modern travel writers to enhance the historiographical status of their works and strengthen public conviction of the veracity of their representations. In travel writing of the period there is a trend towards shoring up credibility through the development of ‘truth topics’ and, more particularly, the textualisation of the writers’ own travailed bodies. Such a procedure confers on the worlds and experiences represented a realism grounded in a relation of empathy between writer and reader enabled by their common possession of an acting and suffering body. Drawing on discursive practices such as the drama or martyrology, among others, which set a premium on the signic potential of the body, the texts discussed show how rhetorical actio comes to rival elocutio as a representational means and truth becomes literally ‘embodied’.
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