Parergon

Abstract:

Female overseas travel has long been viewed as a niche activity involving only a handful of privileged elites. In his book ‘The Traveiler’ (1575), Jerome Turler cast moral aspersions on female travellers, describing them as ‘wide wandring Weemen’. However, an extensive review of the surviving evidence, drawing on underused sources, including the King’s Remembrancer records and diplomatic correspondence, suggests that European travel by English women was far more widespread than previously acknowledged. This article surveys the findings of a new database of over 2100 journeys made by English women to Europe between 1558 and 1630. From this information, it is now possible to construct a more complex understanding of both the extent and nature of female mobility than was previously supposed both by modern historians of travel and earlier commentators such as Jerome Turler.