‘Lying by authority’: travel dissimulations in Fynes Moryson's Itinerary

Abstract

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe have long been recognized as an ‘Age of Dissimulation’; in the period, their compatriots often depicted English travellers to the Continent as the ultimate liars and dissemblers. This article suggests that Fynes Moryson's An Itinerary of a Journey (1617) is one important example of how travel writers engaged with the charge of dissimulation made against them by opponents to European travel, beginning in the 1570s with Roger Ascham's The Scholemaster (1571). With particular focus on the role of Catholic Italy in the travel debate, the article shows how An Itinerary negotiates what was perceived as a hostile and infectious Catholic Italian reality to develop its own approach to travel observation at a moment of generic and epistemic fluidity. Via a number of textual tricks, Itinerary turns the threat of the Inquisition into a strategic advantage; ultimately, the travel report represents strategies of ‘honest dissimulation’ as the basis of the traveller's claim to truthful observation.