ABSTRACT
Writing in 1600, the English compiler John Pory acknowledges that part of the rationale for exploring the rest of the world is to know what constitutes “home.” In the dedication of his English edition of Leo Africanus's A Geographical Historie of Africa (1600), Pory imputes extraordinary agency to early modern geographies, that is to say, to the books themselves: “Wandring vp and downe like Pilgrimes in our owne natiue soile, they bookes haue as it were led us the right way home; that we might at length acknowledge both who and where we are” (sig. A3r). To be able to imagine the world at large through the books in which these worlds are presented is to know what home looks like.
