The saga of women in travel narratives

A significant portion of the accounts written by 16th-century travelers had no literary purpose but constituted a source of research of great historiographical value and became an important resource in various fields: military economic religious and ethnographic. The culture of the 1500s thus received valuable research material. However the plurality of knowledge and interdisciplinary nature of these accounts meant that the subgenre of travel literature was slow to gain recognition. It is preferable to think of travel literature as a collection of texts that drew on travel for themes motifs and forms and which taken as a whole can be identified as an autonomous collection.