Problems of Place in Early Jacobean Nonsense: Localism, Senses, and the Inns of Court

Abstract: The 1611 travelogue Coryate's Crudities has been credited with spearheading new modes of travel writing, but such perspectives can overlook the degree to which the book interpolates older discourses of civility and collaboration. This essay argues that Crudities is invested in intellectual exchange, textual mimesis, and epistolary form, exhibiting an optimism about the possibilities of the virtual, pan-European civility that characterized the earlier Republic of Letters. As such, Thomas Coryate's project was out of step with the humanist culture at the Inns of Court, which had begun to hone a strong sense of local identity grounded in a language of material immediacy and privacy. This language dominates the verses prefacing Crudities , with many of Coryate's panegyrists giving rise to competing sources of sensory input—collapsing sights, tastes, and smells in order to create an illegible textual sensorium. I argue that this nonsensical excess works as a repudiation of Coryate's optimism about textual mimesis and pan-European collaboration, instead reorienting his reader to the grounded exigencies, and pleasures, of place.