ABSTRACT
This chapter critically examines printed almanacs for what they can tell us about early modern English attitudes towards time, temporality, and travel. Almanacs were cheap and extremely popular, and they not only reached out to travellers, but spread quickly to European settlements abroad. A closer look at almanacs as a genre shows us, first, that they celebrated multiple temporalities in everyday life; second, that they often encouraged readers to employ temporal comparisons to think about and assimilate foreignness and difference; and third, that they claimed to offer readers new ways to make travel (and the future more generally), safer, more convenient, and more predictable. Studying almanacs gives us clues as to how ordinary early modern travellers, who did not necessarily write about their voyages, may have constructed their views of the world, both spatially and temporally. Hunt argues that almanacs, because they encouraged a new consciousness about temporality, especially in relation to travel, and because of their wide distribution, deserve to be seen as agents of change in their own right.
