© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2006 JEMH 10,1-2 Also available online – www.brill.nl TRAVEL WRITING AND HUMANISTIC CULTURE: A BLUNTED IMPACT? JOAN-PAU RUBIÉS London School of Economics and Political Science Abstract An influential historiographical tradition has opposed the accounts of extra-European worlds produced by sixteenth-century travel writers to the concerns of humanists and other European men of learning, even detecting a ‘blunted impact’ up until the eighteenth century, when the figure of the philosophical traveller was proclaimed by Rousseau and others. It is my argument that this approach is misleading and that we need to take account of the full influence of travel writing upon humanistic culture in order to under- stand how the Renaissance eventually led to the Enlightenment. A first step consists in analysing the collective impact of accounts of America, Africa and Asia, rather than opposing the ‘New World’ to other areas. Moreover, whilst quantitative estimates offer a route for the assessment of ‘impact’, it is the qualitative aspect which is most clearly central to the cultural history of the period. Even ‘popular’ observers were often subtly influenced by concepts and strategies formulated by the intellectual elites. Under close scrutiny, it appears that humanists—and here I adopt a broad definition—had a crucial role in the production and consumption of travel accounts, as editors and travel collec- tors, as historians and cosmographers, and eventually—from the turn of the seventeenth century—as ‘philosophical travellers’. The article seeks to illustrate these roles with ref- erence to some examples from the first phase of the encounter. In particular, the early accounts of the Columbian expeditions by Nicolaus Scyllacus and Peter Martyr of Anghiera can be shown to have elaborated Columbian material more faithfully than is usually understood to be the case. Similarly, the historiography of conquest published after the middle of the sixteenth century reveals the widespread application of human- ist standards to the literature of encounter produced in the previous sixty years. In the two or three centuries since the inhabitants of Europe have been flooding into other parts of the world, endlessly publishing new collections of voyages and travel, I am persuaded that we have come to know no other men except Europeans. Rousseau, Discourse on the origins and foundations of inequality among men (1754). Rousseau’s claim that European travellers, mostly sailors, merchants, soldiers and missionaries, that is, men of limited education or (in the latter category) imbued with a profound bias, had failed to be philosophical enough to appreciate what the real differences between men were, expressed an aspiration to a new universal and scientific anthropology which had deeper roots than he would have granted. Already in 1604, in a letter to Scaliger, the humanist historian La Popelinière (1541-1608) declared his intention to become a traveller—a philosophical traveller