Tediousness in Coryats Crudities (1611): early modern travel writing, rhetoric, and notions of canonicity

ABSTRACT Despite its increasing prominence in university syllabi and anthologies, travel writing continues to be excluded from the canon of early modern literature. Its exclusion can be attributed to the view, articulated explicitly and implicitly, that its formal and stylistic conventions render it insufficiently ‘literary’. Such assessments reveal a tendency to read early modern travel accounts using aesthetic criteria that are anachronistic, disconnected from the discursive contexts in which these accounts were originally written and read. This article examines one of the genre’s most distinctive features, one which has shaped its relationship to notions of literary value and canonicity: its preoccupation with particulars, something early modern and modern readers alike characterise as ‘tedious’. Focusing on Thomas Coryate’s eponymous Coryats Crudities (1611), it situates the particularity of early modern travel writing within the reconstructed contexts of classical rhetoric, early modern poetics, and travel advice, placing special emphasis on the rhetorical quality of enargeia, or vividness. In addition to offering a fresh assessment of the Crudities and modelling a new approach to the study of travel writing more generally, the article reflects on how we can expand our sense of what early modern literature might be said to comprise.

engagement with the New World in The Tempest, and ends by quoting a passage of Spenser's Faerie Queene that mentions the discovery of 'great regions' such as 'th'Indian Peru' and 'fruitfullest Virginia'. 2The purpose of these canonical references is straightforward to discern.They enable the editors to introduce texts which students are unlikely to have encountered previously, here designated 'narratives of adventure, exploration, trade, and reconnaissance', by placing them alongside texts with which they are much more likely to be familiar, including, in the cases of Othello and The Faerie Queene, texts included in the same anthology.Using the familiar to explain the unfamiliar, and, in so doing, making the unfamiliar comprehensible, is an effective rhetorical manoeuvre, one often employed by travellers themselves.A consequence of this approach, however, is that travel writing is positioned as subordinate to the canon, as material that is significant primarily because it provides historical context for our readings of authors like Shakespeare or Spenser.As a result, little is said about how this writing was understood in its own time, or how we should read it now.
The act of anthologising is closely connected to the process of canon formation in that anthologising involves making claims about the significance of individual texts within a broader literary field.Although anthologies can draw attention to underexamined texts or authors, their structures nonetheless tend to reinforce, rather than interrogate or disrupt, the canon.Anthologies of 'non-Shakespearean' drama, for instance, ironically affirm Shakespeare's centrality to the canon by using him as the standard by which all other dramatists of the period can be assessed and understood. 3Something similar happens in the Norton Anthology.While the title 'The Wider World' refers to the geographies on which early modern travel writing primarily focussed that is, beyond Englandit also suggests that this writing is part of the 'wider world' of English literature, in contrast to the canonical works which the anthology locates, tacitly, at its centre.It is apt that the general editor of the Norton Anthology has been described as 'the keeper of the canon'. 4he Norton Anthology's treatment of travel writing is not unusual: the genre has always existed on the margins of the early modern canon, which traditionally has focused on works of poetry and drama, including the aforementioned works by Shakespeare and Spenser, and paid significantly less attention to non-fiction prose.The term 'canon', as I use it here, refers to a corpus of literature which is considered of exceptional and enduring value, which makes claims to universality, and to which is attributed a kind of cultural authority.Travel writing has been excluded from the early modern canon for several reasons.First, its literary value is contested; indeed, for the most part, travel writing has historically been perceived as sub-literary or even non-literary. 5In his survey of sixteenth-century English literature, for instance, C. S. Lewis referred to the early modern travellers published in Richard Hakluyt's Principall Navigations as 'untaught authors' incapable of 'beating the literary men at their own game'. 6Even when it is treated as literature, travel writing typically is not viewed as a 'high' or 'elite' form; its middling position in the hierarchy of forms disqualifies it from inclusion in the canon, which John Guillory characterises as 'an aristocracy of texts'. 7Second, travel writing does not satisfy the canon's aspirations to universality.It tends to make its cultural, racial, and national allegiances, as well as, in some cases, its colonial and imperial ambitions, explicit. 8Further, far from appearing to transcend the boundaries of time and space, travel writing is rich in circumstantial detail, including frequent references to time, date, place, distance travelled, climate, longitude and latitude, and more.Finally, travel writing has always had an ambivalent relationship to authority because of its association with mendacity.From the early modern stereotype of the 'travel-liar' to more recent assessments of early modern travellers as 'frequent and cunning liars', the credibilityand thus the authorityof travel writing has repeatedly been called into question. 9The association of travel writing with mendacity was fundamental to the genre and its reception, in that the license to lie was what enabled travellers to elicit a sense of wonder in their readers.
In what follows, I want to focus on the first of these issues: perceptions of 'literariness', and their implications for travel writing's exclusion from the canon.I will do so by examining a specific aspect of its style.One of the genre's most striking aesthetic features, perhaps the one that most prevents it from being understood in 'literary' terms, is its preoccupation with particularity.Travellers were expected to use the particulars of their experience as the basis on which to produce knowledge that would be useful for others.Phrases such as 'a particular description' appear frequently in the titles of travel accounts published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and particulars comprise a substantial portion of the material contained in the accounts themselves.Robert Coverte's 1631 account on the East Indies, for example, promises a 'Particular Description of all those Kingdomes, Cities, and People', while Richard Lassels's 1670 Voyage of Italy pivots from the general to the particular by stating 'Having sayd this much of Italy in Generall, I will now come to a particular Description of it'. 10 But travel writing's particularity is also what makes it difficult to read now; to a modern reader, this aspect of its style makes travel accounts seem overly long, rambling, and repetitive, qualities encapsulated by a term that literary scholars often use in reference to these texts: 'tedious'.Such assessments imply that travel writing is tedious because it is excessively and indiscriminately detailed (that is, particular), and assume that this particularity is a failure of style, something that detracts from, rather than enhances, its substance.
Early modern travellers describe their own writings as tedious, too.However, they employ the term, from taedere, 'to weary', in a wider range of senses, including some that are now obsolete, such as 'painful', 'troublesome', 'slow', and 'late'.They use these various senses to refer not only to the prolixity of their writing and the sensations of boredom and weariness that it might induce in the reader, but also to characterise the experience of travel itself.Thus William Biddulph, Levant Company chaplain, articulates his desire 'to avoid tediousnesse' and to 'be briefe, lest by over prolixnesse in writing, I be over tedious to you in reading', yet emphasises that his travel was 'long and tedious', a journey which involved taking a 'barren and tedious' route. 11Biddulph's words suggest a tension between certain principles of style and the reality of travel in this period: although tedious writing is undesirable aesthetically, it nonetheless captures an important aspect of the experience under description.To dismiss the particularity of travel writing as a stylistic failure is thus to overlook the functions that particulars fulfil, both epistemological and experiential.As Mary C. Fuller argues in an essay which begins, memorably, with a description of her 'struggle to stay awake' while reading Hakluyt's Principall Navigations cover to cover, literary critics tend to assess early modern travel writing using aesthetic criteria that are detached from the circumstances in which that writing was produced, and which are difficult, if not entirely impossible, for it to satisfy. 12If we are to examine these travel accounts on their own terms, and, in so doing, understand their relationship to the canon and definitions of literariness, we need to situate them within the contexts in which they were originally written and read.
With these aims in mind, this essay outlines an approach to the aesthetics of early modern travel writing through reference to its engagement with classical rhetoric, especially the exercise of ekphrasis or vivid description and the quality of enargeia or vividness.In what follows, I examine the centrality of rhetoric to the most particularistic, the most tedious, travel writer of them all.The English traveller Thomas Coryate published an account of his travels within Europe, the eponymously titled Coryats Crudities, in 1611. 13His travel observations in the Crudities take up over 600 quarto pages, in addition to over 300 pages of paratextual material, including a set of mock-encomiastic 'Panegyrick Verses' by wits including John Donne and Ben Jonson. 14The volume's heft is all the more remarkable considering Coryate travelled for just five months, a short period of time by early modern standards.
Coryate's particularity means that his debt to any 'art' or precept is, at first, hard to detect; indeed, this apparent artlessness has defined his critical reception since the seventeenth century.Some have read the Crudities in biographical terms and treated it as evidence that Coryate was a 'buffoon'.Writing in the nineteenth century, Augustus Jessopp claimed that Coryate 'left the university without taking a degree, and seems to have led an aimless life for a few years, till […] he became a hanger-on of the court, picking up a precarious livelihood as a kind of privileged buffoon'. 15More recently, the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson echoed this assessment, stating that Coryate 'made a profession out of being the butt of others' wit'. 16Others draw a connection between Coryate's purported buffoonery and the sense that the Crudities is concerned primarily with verbal ornament rather than the transmission of knowledge. 17Because Coryate was the first Englishman to travel explicitly for pleasure, and because there is no documentation to suggest he was travelling for any other purpose, many have viewed him as a progenitor of the Grand Tour, a tourist avant la lettre.Richmond Barbour goes so far as to call Coryate 'Britain's first modern tourist', the individual almost single-handedly responsible for 'the invention of tourism'. 18Analogously, literary critics often describe the Crudities as the first of its kind in the history of English travel writing. 19iewed in the round, the various interpretations of Coryate are difficult to reconcile, depicting him as a buffoonish pioneer, a crackbrained stylist, the originator of English travel writing as well as its worst practitioner.What they reveal, I suggest, is that we need to further develop our understanding of the ways in which early modern travel accounts were written and read.We cannot read Coryate, or any other travel writer, in isolation, but must situate their work within the broader cultural and intellectual contexts in which it was produced.To that end, I offer a fresh assessment of the Crudities by setting it within the contexts of classical rhetoric, early modern poetics, and travel advice.I begin by considering the book's governing metaphor of indigestion, and explain its connection to Coryate's decision to write 'particularly' and 'copiously'.Next, I discuss the centrality of architecture in the account, and establish its relevance to Coryate's search for opportunities for the rhetorical quality of enargeia.I then turn to examine Coryate's strategies of description, which make his account a site of vicarious travel, a textual 'tour'.This reading not only clarifies aspects of Coryate's style that have not previously been fully explained, but it also lays the foundation for further literary studies of early modern travel writing more generally by revealing the extent to which it was shaped by the rhetorical tradition.
I conclude by reflecting on the implications of my reading of the Crudities for our understanding of canonicity.My aim, to be clear, is not to make a case for travel writing's inclusion in the canon, but to ask what its exclusion might tell us about the relationship between conceptions of literary value and the processes of canon formation more broadly.Further, I suggest that the formal and stylistic experimentalism of early modern travel writing should prompt us to rethink our definitions of literature and literariness altogether.

Rhetorical indigestion and writing 'more particularly'
To understand the role of particulars in works of travel writing such as the Crudities, we need first to refer to early modern travel advice.These works urged travellers to establish axioms, or general knowledge, from the particulars of experience.This process was metaphorically understood as 'digestion'.For instance, Fynes Moryson's 'Of Precepts for Travellers', included in his Itinerary (1617), gives the following advice to travellers: Let nothing worth the knowledge pass his eyes or eares, which he draweth not to his own possession in this sort.In the meane time, though he trust not to his papers, yet for the weakenes of memory, let him carefully note all rare observations; for he lesse offends that writes many toyes, then he that omits one serious thing, and later when his judgement is more ripe, he shall distill Gold (as the Proverbe is) out of the dung of Ennius.Let him write these notes each day, at morne and even in his Inne, within writing Tables carried about him, and after at leasure into a paper booke, that many yeers after he may looke over them at his pleasure. 20ryson's 'Precepts' are informed by a set of alimentary metaphors which are frequently used in discussions of note-keeping.The recommendation that the traveller should 'make […] his owne' and take 'possession' of his impressions suggests a process of assimilation, the absorption and incorporation of a substance.His reference to 'the dung of Ennius' is an even more explicit engagement with the humanist principle of digestion.In an anecdote recorded by Donatus and Cassiodorus, Virgil is said to have explained that he was reading Ennius, a poet often described as 'crude', because he was 'looking for gold in a dung-heap'. 21Robert Burton alludes to this anecdote in the copious opening of the Anatomy of Melancholy, in which Democritus Junior disparages those who 'pilfer out of old writers to stuffe up their new comments', as if digging in 'Ennius dunghills'. 22or Moryson, in contrast, the traveller must play the role of both Ennius and Virgil; it is his responsibility to 'distill Gold' from the 'dung' of his own copious notes once his mind is 'ripe' or mature enough to do so.The structure of Moryson's own Itinerary broadly conforms to these principles.It is divided into three parts: the first two are 'journalls' describing his travels, as well as a historical account of the rebellion of the Earl of Tyrone, while the third synthesises the particulars of the earlier parts, grouping them together as 'a discourse upon severall heads'.The principle of digestion is set out in similar terms in a later work of travel advice, Thomas Neale's A Treatise of Direction.Neale commends travellers who 'commit to their briefe note-books the adventures of each day' and 'the notable Acts of each weeke' to 'diaries, Kalendars & Ephemerides', because later, they can turn to these textual repositories and, 'as from a store-house', draw out 'provision' to mitigate the 'famine or barrennesse of oblivion, or their confused memorials', supplementing this material with 'new matter' through 'inlargement'.Like Moryson, Neale employs an alimentary metaphor, instructing travellers to 'ruminate' (what Burton calls 'Mastication or chewing in the mouth') on their material as oxen do with grass, in order to 'tread out the pure and solid Corne of observation'. 23If used carefully, notes can feed the memory, rescuing it from the 'famine' of 'oblivion', while the observational 'Corne' that is produced by digesting them can feed others.
In entitling his account Coryats Crudities, Coryate himself signals that he has not carried out this essential task.'Crudity' stands for that which is raw, unripe, imperfectly digested or indigestible, as well as for the condition of indigestion. 24The book's title is just one of many references to indigestion.The Crudities opens with a description of Coryate's journey from Dover to Calais, during which he 'varnished the exterior parts of the ship with the excrementall ebullitions of my tumultuous stomach' because he had previously 'superfluously stuffed' himself on land.It is already clear that this is an individual given to excess, as immoderate in diet as in (copious, fustian, bombastic) style.Unlike his contemporaries, however, Coryate does not think that a lack of moderation constitutes an ethical or aesthetic failure; on the contrary, he sees it as a virtue.Although 'excrement', from the Latin excrementum, refers to 'what is sifted out', he presents his 'excrementall ebullitions' as a substance to be taken in, claiming that they ended up in 'the gormandizing paunches of the hungry Haddocks'. 25Coryate's vomiting episode is represented as the first image (A) on the book's frontispiece, and receives a double distich in the 'explication of the Emblemes of the frontispiece'.One of the distichs reads: 'First, th'Author here glutteth Sea, Haddocke & Whiting / With spuing, and after the world with his writing'. 26The supposed nourishment of Coryate's vomit is thus the beginning of both the journey and the narrative.There are further references to indigestion on the frontispiece: it describes Coryate's 'crudities' as 'gobled up' (and thus, presumably, improperly chewed) and only belatedly 'digested', but somehow, at the same time, as 'nourishment' for 'the travelling Members of this Kingdome'.Coryate positions the excremental or undigested as a form of sustenance that would both 'satiate' and nourish; in the process, he recuperates crudity as a textual strategy.
This textual strategy is outlined in further detail in Coryate's dedication to Henry, Prince of Wales.Anticipating the 'censure' of 'carping criticks', he gave 'some few reasons' to explain why this book, the 'greene fruits' of 'short travels', merited royal attention.First, he hoped that his 'silly Observations' would 'yeeld some encouragement' to the 'yong Gallants' at court.The 'description of many beautifull Cities, magnificent Palaces, and other memorable matters', he wrote, would inspire them to visit 'forraine countries' and 'outlandish regions' themselves, an experience which would prepare them for future service to the Crown.Second, he promised to 'exhibite' a number of 'things' to Henry's 'Princelie view', including Venice, which he had 'more particularly described, then it hath been ever done before in our English tongue'.To properly 'delineate & paint out' the 'singular beauty' of that city would require an 'exquisite pensill', a 'better stile'; nonetheless, his account reports 'remarkable matters' neglected by previous writers, such as 'antiquities and monuments', 'Palaces', 'Churches', and the 'Piazza of S. Marke'.Similarly, the 'descriptions of other cities' which he 'survayed' in France, Italy, Switzerland, and high Germany offer 'matter of newes' to the English reader, because 'none of these Cities have ever been described in our language'. 27his passage implies a rapprochement between eyewitness travel and reading, two modes of experience which are typically placed in direct opposition.It does so by relating both modes to Coryate's 'description', which is said to function both as an argument for travel, a form of 'encouragement', as well as a substitute for travel, an 'exhibite' or 'view' in its own right.In referring to his book as an 'exhibite' to be 'view[ed]', Coryate presents the Crudities as an exercise in ekphrasis, defined in ancient rhetorical handbooks as speech that 'brings its subject before the eyes' and 'makes listeners into spectators'. 28kphrasis is closely associated with the quality of enargeia, 'vividness' or 'evidentness'. 29Vividness transports the audience through space and time, making them feel as if they are witnesses to, and stimulated by, the things described. 30Early modern writers (who tend to use vernacular translations of equivalent Latin terms for enargeia, including descriptio, illustratio, and evidentia) draw on this set of ideas: the 'description of a thyng' places it 'before the Readers eyes, that it semeth not to be told, but to be done: & the reader not to here it, but se it'; it is 'an evident declaration of a thyng, as though we saw it now doen', enabling the orator to 'collecteth and representeth to the iye, that which he sheweth'. 31To create this illusion of presence and immediacywhich is, as Coryate's references to 'paint' and 'pensill' suggest, often compared to the experience of viewing a paintingthe orator has to first 'see' the things in question himself, forming mental 'visions' that will induce the same affective response that he desires in his listeners.Travelling is one of the examples Quintilian gives of visions which could make the orator and, consequently, the audience, think that they were 'not just imagining but actually doing these things'. 32Like an orator, Coryate calls to mind the sights of his travels, fashioning them into a textual 'description' and, in the process, transforming his readers into proxy witnesses.
By stating that one of his aims is to 'encourage' young men to travel, Coryate implicitly aligns his observations with deliberative oratory, the function of which is to persuade people to take a specific course of action.The association with deliberative rhetoric is made more explicit in Coryate's letter to the reader, which reiterates his desire to 'encourage Gentlemen and lovers of travell to undertake journeys beyond the seas'.'Of all the pleasures in the world', he writes, travel is 'the sweetest and the most delightfull'; nothing is more 'pleasant' than to see passing variety of beautifull Cities, Kings and Princes Courts, gorgeous Palaces, impregnable Castles and Fortresses, Towers piercing in a manner up to the cloudes, fertill territories replenished with a very Cornucopia of al manner of commodities as it were with the horne of Amalthea. 33is, he says, is 'the argument of my booke'. 34The terms of Coryate's 'argument' are strikingly similar to those used by the rhetorician Thomas Wilson in a model 'Oration deliberative', which considers the hypothetical situation 'if I would counsel my friend to travel beyond the Seas'.Wilson recommends finding 'matter to confirme my cause plentifully', and explains that one way to 'enlarge suche matters' is to declare that travel is 'pleasant'.To do this, the orator should 'heap together the variety of pleasures, which come by travel', including the 'strange and ancient buildings' and 'divers other like and almost infinite pleasures'. 35These are not only verbal parallels, but evidence that persuasion to travel is a paradigm of deliberative rhetoric, as exemplification of how to recommend in general, as well as how to recommend travel in particular.This is not the only rhetorical precept in Coryate's mind: the references to Amalthea and cornucopia also invoke the Erasmian ideal of copiousness.
To write an account that would adequately capture, indeed replicate, the copiousness, variety, and pleasure of travel, Coryate focused on recording the particulars of his experience, writing 'more particularly', in 'a more particular manner', than any English traveller had done before.He suggests that this approach to travel writing distinguishes him not only from the 'learned traveller', but also from the 'scholler', 'eloquent historiographer', and 'statist'. 36His ambitions are less grand than theirs, for, as a 'superficial smatterer in learning', a person of 'poore readings', he can only aspire to write 'as faithfully and truly as any man whatsoever'. 37This modesty, though feigned, is epistemologically significant: it frames the Crudities as a set of observations made by an untrained, naked eye, unprejudiced by prior knowledge; it also implies a direct connection between Coryate's lack of expertise, his preoccupation with particulars, and the truthfulness of his writing.
There is, however, an artful artlessness to the heaping up of particulars in the Crudities.Although both powerful and pervasive, its metaphors of indigestion risk obscuring something that would otherwise be obvious: the account does not actually describe everything Coryate saw in the space of five months; such comprehensiveness is impossible.The principles of rhetorical design emerge more clearly when we notice the selections that Coryate does make.The account prioritises some kinds of material over others through processes of selection and exclusion that are largely tacit but occasionally articulated.For example, in his observations of Lyons, Coryate refers to the 'long discourse' he had with a 'scholarly Turk' and gives some details of their exchange, before concluding with the statement that '[m]any other memorable things besides these this learned Turke told me, which I will not now commit to writing'. 38The material that Coryate does 'commit to writing' tends to be on the subject of architecture.As suggested by his dedication to Prince Henry and letter to the reader, Coryate primarily focusses on the description of the 'Palaces', 'Churches', 'Castles' and 'Fortresses' he saw during his travels.The following section considers the significance of this architectural focus to Coryate's project of writing 'more particularly' than any English traveller had done before.In doing so, it reconstructs the connections between Coryate's writing on architecture and aspects of the rhetorical tradition and demonstrates the parallels between his descriptive strategies and those employed by writers working in other genres, including poetry.

Architecture, early modern travel advice, and ekphrasis
Like other aspects of the Crudities, Coryate's focus on architecture should be set within the context of early modern travel advice, which instructs travellers to take notes on the buildings they encounter.Two orations on travel by the German humanist Hermann Kirchner (translated into English by Coryate himself and printed in the Crudities) recommend those desirous of learning to seek out 'ruines', 'statues of ancient men', and 'Images of antiquity'.They also, in contrast to Coryate's own emphasis on crudity, emphasise the importance of digestion, using Plato as an example of a traveller who 'sifted all the monuments of antiquity with his most singular industry, and entred into the very marrow and pith itselfe of Moses truth'.Kirchner is referring to 'monuments' in the textual sense: the Latin reads 'monumenta antiquitatis omnia singulari industria evolvit', in which monumenta refers to texts and evolvit the act of 'unrolling', as if of a scroll, or, idiomatically, 'reading'. 39Kirchner's phrasing suggests that the traveller is expected to read the textual 'monuments of antiquity' while viewing its 'ruines', 'statues' and 'Images'.Coryate's translation, 'sifted all the monuments', recalls the Virgilian sift through dung for gold, and, like the Crudities more generally, uses this image to analogise the acts of reading and seeing.Similarly, Albrecht Meyer's Certaine Briefe, and Speciall Instructions, translated into English in 1589, includes a section on 'Topographie, or the portraiture of particular places', which mentions 'castels', 'towres', 'entrances and gates', 'wals', 'streets', 'houses & pallaces' as features to observe.Francis Bacon's essay 'Of Travaile' stresses that 'Men should make Diaries' during travel, and take note of 'Courts', 'Churches', 'Wals', 'Antiquities' and 'Ruines', amongst other things. 40 This goodly building or rather Pallaice, was erected by Ferdinand of Arragon the first, king of Naples in fourme fouresquare, but somewhat long, in whose walles stand very auncient Pictures to be seene.The middle court was made to washe in […] that great Courte is round aboute compassed with a beautifull, and verie gorgeous gallerie.But in the last siege of the Cittie of Naples, that Frenchmen spoyled not onely this Gallerie: but welnighe all the whole Pallaice. 41is could easily pass as an excerpt from Coryate's own observations.Turler's adjectives 'goodly', 'auncient', 'beautifull', and 'gorgeous', used in relation to architecture and art, recur in the Crudities, in which 'goodly courts', 'exceeding ancient' inscriptions, and palaces that 'make a very glorious and beautifull shew' appear frequently. 42Like Turler, Coryate uses buildings as a point of departure for more extensive discussions of historical context, paying particular attention to the foundation of cities, such as the fact that Bergamo was founded by 'one Cirinus King of Liguria'. 43As in Turler's reference to the siege of Naples, Coryate lingers over evidence (both visual and textual) of ruin and decay; for instance, he recalls the 'harme' done to Vercellis (Vercelli) by Autharus, the third Lombard, resulting in large portions of the city being 'demolished' and 'defaced'. 44This preoccupation with defacement means that the textual record of place becomes a means of reading both what is and is not there, rendering the material artefact a testament of history as well as simply of the physical presence of place.In this way, travel writing forms a bridge between the ancient past and its own time.
Travellers writing at around the same time as Coryate, including Fynes Moryson and George Sandys, also pay close attention to architecture and antiquities.The title-page of Moryson's Itinerary references 'the situation of Cities, the descriptions of them, with all Monuments in each place worth the seeing'.Sandys's Relation, like the Crudities, is dedicated to Prince Henry, and is especially interested in the historical and political processes by which 'sumptuous buildings become ruines'. 45Angus Vine identifies Moryson, Sandys, and Coryate as examples of seventeenth-century 'antiquarian travellers' committed to studying 'vestiges of the past'. 46owever, while architecture is just one of the many topics discussed by Moryson and Sandys, who are equally interested in government, religion, law, and medicine, it is at the centre of the Crudities.As indicated above, Coryate's remarks on etymology, history, and politics are, more often than not, prompted by encountersactual, or imaginativewith buildings and monuments.And, as we will see, these features often provide a formal structure for the observations themselves.
The privileged status of architecture in the Crudities can be partially explained by Coryate's biography: he had personal connections to a number of English connoisseurs with interests in architecture, including Henry Wotton, Inigo Jones, and the Earl of Arundel, and his involvement with the household of Prince Henry would have given him access to the masques and entertainments staged by Jones and Ben Jonson, featuring elaborate sets and spectacular special effects of Jones's design. 47Michelle O'Callaghan suggests that Coryate's offer to act as the 'eyes' of the prince is informed by a sense of civic duty, and that his descriptions of architecture should thus be viewed as a form of intelligence-gathering, with architectural innovation functioning as an index of a nation's military and naval power. 48he reading of Coryate as an intelligencer is however difficult to square with his insistent claim to be a 'private man' uninterested in affairs of state, and with the account's emphasis on delight.Nor, however, does it seem that Coryate was interested in architecture for artistic reasons.As Melanie Ord notes, the travel writing of this period does not possess a 'developed artistic and architectural appreciation'; and, despite his proximity to figures in English architecture, Coryate himself had little knowledge of the technicalities of the subject. 49Biography thus does not fully explain the scale and extent of the architectural descriptions in the Crudities.
Rather, Coryate's engagement with architecture is better understood as part of his aim to give readers a 'view' of travel through ekphrasis.Cities, buildings, and statues are among the principal subjects of ekphrasis as defined and practiced in antiquity. 50Moreover, enargeiathe quality or effect with which ekphrasis is associatedis often discussed in architectural terms, as in Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy.Distinguishing between the 'wordish description' of philosophy and the 'perfect picture' of poetry, Sidney identifies the latter as the form that is most capable of granting the reader access to the things being described.He gives the example of 'the architector' who rattles off a list of the features of a 'gorgeous palace' without satisfying his listener's 'inward conceits'.By contrast, the poet is able to show the 'house well in model', leading others to a 'judicial comprehending of them'.The poet's practice of enargeia makes it possible for the reader to see the description, rather than simply hear the enumeration of its features.This suggests that both the architector and the poet deal in particulars, but that there is a crucial difference of mode that permits one to describe more effectively than the other.Moreover, for Sidney, the poet is superior to the philosopher specifically because of his handling of particulars: while the philosopher is confined to 'precept' and 'bare rule', the poet 'coupleth the general notion with the particular example', telling of the 'particular marks' of things; it is, to an extent, its particularity that enables poetry to offer up an 'image' to the mind. 51Coryate reconciles the Sidneian figures of the poet and the architector in suggesting that the provision of particulars can set sights before his reader's eyes.There are thus surprising overlaps between the 'tedious' style of early modern travel writing and the more conventionally appreciated forms of early modern poetry: although they take very different approaches, Coryate and Sidney aim at the same goal.
The notion that enargeia could be achieved through the accumulation of particulars is also present in Quintilian, who explains that 'sometimes, the picture we wish to present is made up of a number of details'; to describe it, the orator must 'expand everything', giving a sense of the 'whole' by setting out its 'parts'.Quintilian's term for this type of enargeia is 'ex pluribus', 'out of many'. 52Architecture lends itself especially well to this mode of description, in that an entire building can be easily broken down into its constituent parts, materials, colours, and textures, and viewed from a variety of perspectives.Indeed, architectural description can only work through this kind of particularisation, because it is impossible to take in an entire building at once.Julius Caesar Scaliger's Poetices libri septem discusses enargeia under the term 'hypotyposis', literally an architectural plan, using a series of architectural terms, including 'lines', 'dimensions' and 'proportions', and explains that its main modes were the description of characters and places. 53Coryate's 'many lines', his 'particular' descriptions of cities and buildings, including 'gorgeous Palaces', are thus an example of how theories of enargeia could be put into practice in the context of travel writing, and an illustration of the close connections between rhetoric and travel writing more generally.
Paradoxically, Coryate's particularity thus makes his writing simultaneously vivid, spectacular, and touristic, as well as bloated and crude.Pointing to Coryate's tendency to describe in 'meticulous detail', Raymond-Jean Frontain calls the Crudities 'an equal mix of hyperbole and tedium', referring to a passage on the Doge's Palace in Venice as a 'particularly tedious' example. 54Frontain's choice of language is apt, as Coryate also describes that passage, and others like it in the Crudities, as 'tedious'; and, like Frontain, he attributes that tediousness to its provision of detail, or, rather, particulars.Before commencing his description of the Piazza of St. Mark, he writes: But I will descend to the particular description of this peerelesse place, wherein if I seeme too tedious, I crave pardon of thee (gentle Reader) seeing the variety of the curious objects which it exhibiteth to the spectator is such, that a man shall much wrong it to speake a little of it.The like tediousnesse thou art like to finde also in my description of the Dukes Palace, and St. Markes Church, which are such glorious workes, that I endeavoured to observe as much of them as I might, because I knew it was uncertaine whether I should ever see them againe, though I hoped for it. 55r Coryate, 'tedious', does not mean boring, but exhaustive.Here, as elsewhere, he uses the term 'observe' to mean 'record in writing', and gives two justifications for his 'tediousnesse'.First, he suggests that it is an entirely appropriate response to variety and the attempt to capture it in writing, and that it would 'wrong' the 'curious objects' in question to describe them too briefly.Second, he implies that his 'tedious' observations of these places would function as a substitute for travel in the event that he could not 'see them againe' in person.The 'exhibite' and 'view' of ekphrasis is not only reserved for the reader: although he has seen these places with his own eyes, Coryate too stands to benefit from particular description and the kind of imaginative 'seeing' it facilitates.Writing tediously is thus a way of paying respect to things that are beautifully made, as well as a way of keeping a record, for one's own future reference or for others, taking hold of images that, if trusted to the memory alone, would simply decay.
Coryate's intention to 'descend' to a 'tedious' description also echoes an earlier moment in the Crudities in which he undertakes a 'tedious descent' after crossing the Alps, taking 'waies' that are 'exceeding uneasie' and 'wonderfull hard, all stony and full of windings and intricate turnings'. 56As we have already seen, Coryate frequently suggests parallels between travel, writing, and reading by using the same terms to refer to the sights of his travels as well as to the style in which they are described, such as 'copious' and 'various'.'Tedious' is another example.To describe something as tedious is to suggest that it is 'long and tiresome'; it is said of anything that takes up a substantial amount of time, such as a narrative, or a journey.It refers to states of tiredness and exhaustion, as well as, in older senses, to slowness or lateness. 57Coryate's descriptions are indeed sometimes tedious, but they are meant to be: the experience of reading them approximates his own experience of tedious travel, as suggested by the frequency with which the panegyrists in the prefatory material to the Crudities pair 'mile' with 'style'.
Once again, Moryson's writings provide a helpful point of comparison.To explain the way in which he composed his Itinerary (1617), he uses a 'strange Riddle': 'I wrote it swiftly, and yet slowly'; 'swiftly' because his pen 'was ready and nothing curious', and 'slowly', due to 'the long time past since I viewed these Dominions, and since I tooke this worke in hand'.'Curious' writing is, in Moryson's view, simply a distraction, and often used to compensate for a lack of substantial subject matter, functioning as 'rich imbroidery laid upon a frize jerken'; that is, a garment made out of course, homespun cloth. 58In the Crudities, however, rhetorical ornament serves a distinct purpose.By offering descriptions that are as exhaustive as they are exhausting, Coryate slows the pace at which the narrative progresses; he (and the reader) cannot move on until a place has been thoroughly surveyed.The rhetorical term 'dilate' is especially relevant to Coryate's 'tedious' writing.Often used as a synonym of 'amplify', to dilate is to widen, expand, and enlarge.The term often appears in definitions of invention, the part of rhetoric responsible for 'dilatyng argumentes'. 59But its other senses are temporal: to 'dilate' is to 'delay', 'defer', as well as to 'extend in time, protract, prolong, lengthen'. 60or Coryate, amplificationwriting copiously, variously, dilatorily, particularly, tediouslyworks to counter the sense that he spent too little time observing, that he 'gobled' rather than chewed.Instead of viewing Coryate's tediousness as a failure of style, then, we must understand it as an element of a broader textual strategy, one which enables him to negotiate the formal and epistemological challenges involved in describing his travels.

Conclusion
This reading of the Crudities has implications for our understanding of canonicity more generally.First, it has shown that reassessing the literary value of a previously under-appreciated text or genre can involve placing it within broader discursive contexts, including contexts which might not seem relevant to the concerns of literary criticism at all, but which enable us to understand the text or genre on its own terms.Appreciating Coryate's 'tedious' style, for example, requires examining its relationship not only to rhetoric and poetics but also to works of early modern travel advice such as Moryson's 'Of Precepts for Travellers'.These works, which adapt the humanist principle of digestion to the context of travel, help us to understand the codes and conventions of the genre, and thus the ways in which Coryate subverts them through his 'crudity'.Second, this reading of the Crudities illustrates the ways in which certain genres, and the modes of reading they elicit, are antithetical to the processes of canon formation.I have suggested that understanding the style of early modern travel accounts requires us to attend to the structures of these texts: the split between particular experience and general knowledge in Moryson's Itinerary, for example, or the encounters with buildings and monuments which provide a formal structure for observations on etymology, history, and politics in the Crudities.To grasp the structures of travel accounts, which tend to be very long (or tedious), we need to read them in full.Yet anthologies such as the Norton Anthology, when they include early modern travel writing at all, are restricted, for practical reasons, to providing excerpts from such texts.As a result, anthologieswhich, as noted earlier, play an important role in canon formation, and in implicitly reinforcing the distinction of 'canonical' and 'non-canonical' texts or genrestend to present travel writing in ways which erase or distort the contexts in which it was originally written and read.Finally, I hope I have shown that interrogating received ideas about the centrality or marginality of various genresthe centrality of drama and poetry and the marginality of travel writing, saycan help us to advance our understanding of early modern conceptions of form and style more generally.For instance, the parallels between Coryate and Sidney reveal that the challenge of negotiating the relationship between the particular and the general is not unique to poets, architectors, and philosophers, but one faced by travel writers, too.By appreciating such parallels, we can expand and enrich our sense of what early modern literature might be said to comprise.
Jerome Turler's De peregrinatione, translated into English in 1575, includes a description of Naples as an example of the 'viewing & diligent consideration of things' that should be carried out during travel.Describing the 'Kinges Pittes or Pondes', Turler writes: