Reading the Ottoman Empire: Intertextuality and Experience in Henry Blount’s Voyage into the Levant (1636)

Abstract

Abstract The English traveller Henry Blount (1602–1682), author of A Voyage into the Levant (1636), is renowned for attempting to view the Ottoman Empire with an open mind and to understand it on its own terms. Scholars of the Voyage have examined Blount’s attitude to cultural difference, as well as his relationship to emerging discourses of empiricism, especially the works of Francis Bacon. This essay argues that the cultural politics and philosophical outlook of the Voyage are fundamentally connected to, and, in some cases, problematized by, Blount’s intertextual strategies. It shows that Blount’s digestion of his reading shapes his theoretical approach to travel, including his understanding of perception, cognition, and experience, and is central to his description of the Ottoman Empire. As well as identifying Blount’s borrowings from and paraphrases of writings by Bacon, Michel de Montaigne, George Sandys, and, indirectly, Aristotle, my argument demonstrates that early modern travel writing offers an especially striking example of the parallels between observation and reading that characterize the writings of the period more generally.