From Travel Guide to Self-Discovery in Andrew Boorde’s Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge (1547)

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Travel writing, perhaps more than most kinds of literature, is a loosely defined body, capable of absorbing a broad range of narrative styles and genres. Andrew Borde’s The First Book of the Introduction of Knowledge (composed in 1542 and published in 1547) is an eminent example of such fluidity and versatility, although strictly speaking it offers no account of any travel to a specific place. On the face of it, the book presents itself rather like an entertaining precursor to our modern travel guides and phrase books, written by a priest, physician and government informant at the service of Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell. And yet, reflecting the uncertainty and the confusion of the first decade of the break from Rome, the book repeatedly intersects with the period’s key concern of negotiating a personal and an English identity and a place for the self in the midst of many religious and political turbulences both at home and abroad. A missing link between the theory and practice of discovery, Borde’s hybrid work is, I will argue, an introduction to the place of the self through addressing the knowledge of the other.