Text and topos: British travellers to real-and-imagined classical sites, c. 1560–1820

Early-modern British travellers to the Mediterranean often understood their journeys through the lens of classical texts and culture. Historians sometimes explain this as an imaginative phenomenon: travellers’ preconceptions shaped by classical knowledge guided their subsequent comprehension and activity. This article instead argues that travellers’ experiences of classical sites incorporated both physical and imaginative aspects, usefully expressed by two meanings of the Greek word topos, which can mean both ‘place’ and ‘convention’. Travellers were attentive to the empirical details of the sites they physically encountered, but they also saw those locations in terms of cultural discourses. In this way, their engagement with classical sites blends the material and the discursive to create ‘real-and-imagined’ spaces. The article next explores the effects of materiality on travellers’ experiences. Using insights from actor-network theory, it shows how objects and other non-human agents contributed to the formation of real-and-imagined spaces, and that travellers at classical sites were not always in full control of their experiences. This perspective – alive to the material and the representational, and aware of multiple agents interacting at a site – proposes a less anthropocentric understanding of travel.