Ben Jonson's Walk to Scotland: An Annotated Edition of the 'Foot Voyage'

At the heart of this book is a previously unpublished account of Ben Jonson's celebrated walk from London to Edinburgh in the summer of 1618. This unique firsthand narrative provides us with an insight into where Jonson went, whom he met, and what he did on the way. James Loxley, Anna Groundwater and Julie Sanders present a clear, readable and fully annotated edition of the text. An introduction and a series of contextual essays shed further light on topics including the evidence of provenance and authorship, Jonson's contacts throughout Britain, his celebrity status, and the relationships between his 'foot voyage' and other famous journeys of the time. The essays also illuminate wider issues, such as early modern travel and political and cultural relations between England and Scotland. It is an invaluable volume for scholars and upper-level students of Ben Jonson studies, early modern literature, seventeenth-century social history, and cultural geography.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Jonson's 'foot voyage' and the Aldersey manuscript; My gossip Jonson his foot voyage and mine into Scotland; Contextual essays; 1. The genres of a walk; 2. Jonson's foot work; 3. Scenes of hospitality; Works cited; Index.

About the Author :
James Loxley is Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He has published widely on renaissance poetry and drama, and also on issues in contemporary literary theory. His publications include Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil War (1997), Ben Jonson (2002) and Shakespeare, Jonson and the Claims of the Performative (with Mark Robson, 2013). Anna Groundwater lectures in British and Scottish History at the University of Edinburgh. Her publications include The Scottish Middle March, 1573 to 1625: Power, Kinship, Allegiance (2010) and Scotland Connected: The History of Scotland, Britain and the World at a Glance (forthcoming, 2017). She is on the councils of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, the Scottish Medievalists and the Scottish History Society, and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Julie Sanders is Professor of English Literature and Drama at the University of Nottingham and Vice Provost (Teaching and Learning) at the Ningbo China campus. She has edited plays by Ben Jonson, Richard Brome and James Shirley, and was a contributing editor to The Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson (2012). Her other publications include The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama, 1620–1650 (2011), which won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for international women's scholarship in 2012.