Our titles on this subject
Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme
Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.
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Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla (c. 1230)
A century after Adam, the Icelander Snorri recounts from within the kings the canon knew only by hearsay. Harald Bluetooth, the two Olafs, and Cnut the Great reappear here, but seen by the Norsemen themselves, with their sagas, their skalds, and their own memory. To read Snorri after Adam is to hear the other version of the same history, that of the conquered finally given voice.
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Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum (c. 1200)
Around 1200, this Danish clerk composed in Latin the great chronicle of his people. He knew Adam's work and carried it forward, giving the Danish kings their national epic. Here one meets the heroes and legends that Bremen had barely glimpsed, in an ample language that seeks to rival the Ancients.
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Olaus Magnus, A Description of the Northern Peoples (1555)
In 1555, this Swedish prelate, exiled in Rome, published a vast description of Scandinavia, illustrated with famous engravings. Five centuries after Adam, he still describes the same ice, the same sea monsters, the same peoples of the far reaches, but with the eye of the Renaissance. Adam's wonder survives here, barely tempered by the new science.
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Michel de Montaigne, Journal de voyage en Italie (1580-1581)
Three quarters of a century after Dürer, Montaigne crosses Switzerland and Germany on his way to Italy and stops for a week in Venice in November 1580. He finds the city less marvellous than he had imagined, observes its institutions, its policing and its courtesans, and receives a book of letters from Veronica Franco. The journal, partly dictated to a secretary, was not rediscovered and published until 1774. In it we find what Dürer described from the inside: a city that welcomes the stranger with curiosity and a little mistrust, and a traveller from the North who measures, with irony, what he has gained and lost by leaving home.
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Thomas Coryat, Coryat's Crudities (1608)
In 1608, an eccentric from Somerset set off on foot across France and Italy, spent six weeks in Venice, then returned to England through Switzerland, along the Rhine and across the Low Countries. His Crudities, published in 1611, offer one of the liveliest English descriptions of Venice: Saint Mark's Square, the gondolas, the courtesans, the Doge's Palace, and the Italian use of the fork, which he reports as a curiosity. On the Rhine he travels almost the same river as Dürer, from Mainz to Cologne, and then crosses the Dutch provinces. His jesting, boastful tone sometimes recalls Dürer's letters to Pirckheimer a century earlier, when the painter mocked the friends he had left behind in Nuremberg.
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Voyage en Italie (1786-1788)
In September 1786, Goethe slipped away from Karlsbad in secret and made his way south to Italy. He spends just over two weeks in Venice, climbs the campanile of Saint Mark's, watches the boats, discovers the sea, hurries through Palladio's churches and the paintings of the Venetian masters, and attends the pleadings in court and the popular theatre. It is the founding account of the German journey to Italy, that of a Northerner who comes in search of a personal renaissance. Almost three centuries earlier, Dürer had already taken this road and felt the same thing, in rougher language: in Venice he is treated as a gentleman, and he fears becoming, at home, a mere parasite again.
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John Gabriel Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796)
A Scottish officer in Dutch service, Stedman fought in Surinam from 1772 to 1777 against Boni's Maroons, in the same swamps and forests as John Thomson. His great narrative, published in London in 1796 with engravings by William Blake, tells of marches through mud, hammocks slung from trees, mosquitoes, burned villages, and the atrocious justice of the planters. He weaves into it his love for Joanna, a young slave. Thomson's letter, written in 1787, is an anonymous little brother of this famous book: the same war, the same pity before burned huts and felled trees.
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Albert von Sack, A Narrative of a Voyage to Surinam (1810)
Twenty years after Thomson, the Prussian baron Albert von Sack settles in Surinam from 1805 to 1807, during the Napoleonic wars, while the colony has passed under English control. An amateur naturalist, he describes the fauna, the flora, the plantations and the customs of the colony, then returns to Europe by way of North America, Philadelphia, New York and Boston. His account appears in London in 1810, translated from the German. The reader finds there the same colony as in Thomson's letter, seen this time by a curious gentleman and not by an underpaid soldier who drinks water for want of beer.
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Victor Hugo, Le Rhin (1838-1840)
Hugo travelled up the Rhine in the late 1830s and drew from it, in 1842, a book of letters to a friend. He stops at Aachen before the tomb of Charlemagne, contemplates the unfinished cathedral of Cologne, marvels at Bacharach, Sankt Goar and the ruined castles, and blends legend, history and European politics into the landscapes. It is almost exactly Dürer's route of 1520: the same toll towns, the same chapel of Charlemagne where the painter saw Charles V crowned, the same Cologne where he obtained his pension. Where Dürer counted the florins paid to the customs men, Hugo dreams before the ruins of a vanished Middle Ages.
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Pierre Jacques Benoit, Voyage à Surinam (1839)
A Belgian painter, Pierre Jacques Benoit travels to Surinam in 1830 and brings back an album published in Brussels in 1839: nearly a hundred lithographs and a text that traces the history of the colony, its population, its festivals, its trade and its plantations. The plates show Amerindians, slaves, settlers, the houses of Paramaribo and the landscapes of the river. It is the image missing from Thomson's letter: the colony he describes without being able to draw it, caught by an artist half a century later, a generation before the abolition of slavery in Surinam in 1863.
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Johann Georg Kohl, Die deutsch-russischen Ostseeprovinzen (1841)
A tutor in Courland from 1830, Johann Georg Kohl then travels through Livonia before pushing on to Saint Petersburg. In 1841 he publishes in Dresden two volumes on the nature and the peoples of the Baltic provinces: German barons, Latvian and Estonian peasants, Hanseatic towns, post roads and long winters. It is Peters's Riga eighty years later, seen by a native of Bremen who went, like him, to earn his living in these German-speaking Russian provinces. The sleighs, the relays and the country pastors are still there.
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Eugène Fromentin, Les Maîtres d'autrefois (1875)
A painter and writer, Fromentin set out in 1875 to see the paintings of Belgium and Holland on the spot, and published the following year this book, which became a classic of art criticism. He follows Rubens to Antwerp and Mechelen, stops at Bruges before Memling and at Ghent before the Ghent Altarpiece of the Van Eycks, then reaches the Holland of Rembrandt. It is one of the rare accounts that look at these cities with a painter's eyes, as Dürer did in 1521, when he noted in Ghent the picture by Jan and in Bruges the Madonna of Michelangelo. Three and a half centuries separate the two travellers, but the same question guides them: how did these masters do it?
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Jules Crevaux, Voyages dans l'Amérique du Sud (1883)
In July 1877, the naval physician Jules Crevaux goes up the Maroni, the river that now separates Suriname from French Guiana. There he meets the descendants of the Maroons whom Thomson's soldiers hunted a century earlier: an Aluku, Apatou, becomes his guide. Together they reach the Wayana, cross the Tumuc-Humac mountains and descend the Jari to the Amazon; Crevaux arrives in Belém almost naked. The account of his expeditions appears with Hachette in 1883. The fugitives of yesterday have become boatmen and guides, masters of a forest where Europeans still do not know how to walk.
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Pierre Loti, An Iceland Fisherman (1886)
At the end of the nineteenth century, the French novelist follows Breton sailors on their campaigns across the icy fishing banks of Iceland. Adam's Thule, a land where the ice burns, has become a place of toil and mourning. The novel gives flesh, eight centuries on, to the dread the canon felt before these seas at the edge of the world.