Writing the travelling self: travel and life‐writing in Peter Mundy's (1597–1667) Itinerarium Mundii

Abstract

This article explores the manuscript travel journal of the seventeenth century merchant adventurer Peter Mundy (d. 1667), seeking for instances of life writing amidst the hybrid forms of his textual and visual production of more than five hundred folios. It will argue that Mundy's manuscript travel journal Itinerarium Mundii, was not just a strategically selfconcealing or ‘fashioning’ text. It formed part of a life long process of accounting, editing, recording, and re‐writing, where Mundy sought not just to hide his own opinions and person, as has been sometimes claimed, but also recorded memorable events and travels, making sense of a lifetime of travels both for himself and his interested friends. This will not just provide a new perspective on Peter Mundy, but, it is hoped, encourages scholars to widen the scope of studies of early modern travel writing by opening them up for inquiries into the ways in which travelers and their ‘selves’ were embedded in, represented, and recorded in similar texts.