English travellers to Venice 1450-1600

English travellers to Venice 1450 – 1600

Edited by Michael G. Brennan

Hakluyt Society, Series III Volume 39, 2022

ISBN 978-1-032-17054-1

Volume 39 in the Hakluyt Society Third Series is a collection of 35 accounts of visits by English travellers to Venice during the 15th and 16th centuries, edited by Michael Brennan and including 27 colour and 45 black and white illustrations. These accounts have been drawn from contemporary manuscript and printed sources and provide vivid impressions of the challenges endured by visitors to Venice during the period 1450 to 1600 and of the complexities of Anglo-Venetian relations during the pre- and post-Reformation periods. These travellers include pilgrims, scholars, religious exiles, ambassadors, English courtiers and noblemen, eccentric and renegade characters, seafarers and an undercover intelligence gatherer during the late 1580s for Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s ‘spymaster’.

The introduction to English Travellers to Venice 1450 –1600 assesses Anglo-Venetian contacts during this period and examines some specific topics, including the leading role of Venetian naval experts in attempts in 1545 to salvage Henry VIII’s flagship the Mary Rose, a first-hand account by an English visitor’s servant of the disastrous and lethal 1575–7 outbreak of the plague at Venice, and, during the build-up to the Spanish Armada, the impressive reach of the Venetian intelligence service which enabled the doge and Council to remain well informed about both Spanish and English plans. This volume includes a selection of engravings of Venetian life from the renowned collections of Giacomo Franco. A wide range of illustrations is also included from important early maps of Venice, by Erhard Reuwich for Bernard von Breydenbach’s Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctam (1486), Hartmann Schedel’s Liber chronicarum (1493), Jacopo de’ Barbari’s aerial view of Venice (1500) and the stunning map of Venice in Civitates orbis terrarum (1572–1617) by Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg.

Highly recommended to historians of the period as well as anyone with an interest in the wonderful city of Venice.

Published price £120. Distributed free to Hakluyt Society members as part of their two volume allowance for the year 2022. Society members can buy in print and print on demand volumes at a significant discount. Join the Hakluyt Society.