ABSTRACT
One of the most important sites for renegotiating early modern identity is religion and its social institutions. The turmoil following in the wake of the various reformations destabilized the British Christian community in a much more radical way than any of the diversifications of the pre-reformation era had done. Tudor travel writing participates in a number of discourses. The screen of perception, however, was always defined by the traveller's own religious background, and the pattern for describing foreign religions was the pattern of differences between Catholicism and Protestantism. The writings of these Tudor and early Stuart travellers, therefore, can be analysed not only as examples of a particular kind of colonial discourse, but also as texts that are symptomatic of the changes in the perception of the world which took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and which constitute the 'modernity' of the early modern period.
