In this collection of six essays, contributors examine how the act of travel compared to the travelers' descriptions of it, and analyze how travel narratives of the early modern period relate to the formation of humanistic culture. They cover questions of value in the Early English Travel Collection, Thévenot's contributions to the culture of curiosity, the efforts by Peter Kolb in the eighteenth century to create an authoritative text on the Khoikhoi at the Cape of Good Hope, the work of Benzenet's travel narratives in the Quaker anti-slavery movement before the American Revolution, and the idea that travel writing was not fully realized from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries because the leading lights of the Enlightenment were not yet involved. Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)