ABSTRACT
The 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper (1671–1713), commenting on the ubiquity of the genre, observed, in 1710, that travel books ‘are the chief materials to furnish out a library…[and are] in our present days, what books of chivalry were to our forefathers’. Contrasting reader responses of his times with what he saw as the credulity of that of his forefathers, he concluded that ‘for our faith, indeed, as well as our taste… I must confess I can't consider reading it, without astonishment’. 1 Since Shaftesbury was one of the three figures (the others were Hume and Burke) with whom Terry Eagleton 2 begins his explorations into the category of the aesthetic in post-Enlightenment Europe, the Earl's observation about the reading practices of his own time deserves serious attention on at least two counts. Firstly, because that interest in travellers’ tales offers evidence of interest in other places and peoples, about which the publication of specialist texts on cosmography at that time provides testimony. Secondly, that such an interest runs parallel with the reading of what was probably the largest single genre at that time: sermons and other texts with the objective of moral improvement.
