‘The colour of the country’: English travellers in Spain, 1604–1625

Abstract

The travel writings produced by English travellers to early modern Spain reveal complex and contradictory attitudes to a country that was at once exotic and little known, subject of considerable cultural interest and translation activity, a former ally and yet before the Treaty of London in 1604 the subject of 20 years of hostilities. Travellers’ accounts reflect the cultural baggage they took with them, made up of both anti-Spanish propaganda and literary images. The desire to challenge Spanish imperial might and political authority was often expressed through invoking religious difference and by associating Spain with the Ottoman Turks and racial miscegenation. While English travellers represented the common people as deluded by Jesuits and attacked Catholic superstition and veniality, they also lavished praise on cultural achievements like the Escorial. These ambivalences and contradictions underline the extent to which in the early seventeenth century Spain played an integral part in how the English defined themselves and constructed their own identity.