This book offers an exciting array of contributions to the study of Locke’s own study of travel literature. The importance of its vast topic was acknowledged from the beginning of serious secondary writing about him. Lord Peter King, in his Life of John Locke (1829), remarked that Locke “employed his leisure in reading books of travels, of the best of which he was a great admirer.” This book, drawing upon and considerably expanding the contents of a 2022 special issue of Studi Lockiani, provides recent findings and discoveries, pressing into uncharted areas. The authors and editors use a wide array of sources, treating “travel literature” broadly and capaciously to include the grand works of travel represented by Hakluyt, Purchas, Bernier, Thévenot, Ramusio, Ogilby, and Sagard, as well as specific “relations” of travels to the far reaches of the world, information-conveying correspondence, notebook entries, and maps (especially when annotated). The topic is of great interest not only to Locke scholars, but also to all those investigating cultural anthropology, political philosophy, the expansion of colonialism, the history of ideas, and their circulation in the early modern period.
Giuliana Di Biase is professor of moral philosophy at G. d' Annunzio University, Italy, where she has been teaching Ethics and Philosophical Anthropology for 20 years. Her earlier research interests revolved around contemporary debates in normative and applied ethics in Britain. She has devoted three books and numerous articles to this subject. More recently, she has come to investigate the roots of those debates in the philosophy of John Locke. She has published two books and thirty articles and chapters which examine Locke's ideas on toleration, virtue, moral goodness, custom, education, equality, natural law and knowledge. She is the editor-in-chief of the Italian journal Studi lockiani. Ricerche sull'età moderna, entirely dedicated to the philosophy of John Locke. In 2022, she edited a special issue of Studi lockiani focusing on Locke's reading in travel literature. Her contribution to that special issue centered on the travelogues mentioned in the voluminous correspondence between Locke and Nicolas Toinard.
James Farr is professor emeritus of political science and former director of the Chicago Field Studies at Northwestern University. He taught there for 15 years, before which he also taught at Ohio State, University of Wisconsin, and University of Minnesota. His scholarly interests in recent years have centered on the politics and philosophy of John Locke. In this connection, he has published eight articles with special attention to Locke's views of slavery, colonialism, and travel literature, as well as his role in the revisions of the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. He has published more than sixty other articles or chapters on Hobbes, Rousseau, Lieber, Marx, Dewey, Popper, social capital, the philosophy and history of social science. With different coeditors, he has also published six edited volumes, most of them with Cambridge University Press, including Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, Political Science in History, and The General Will: The Evolution of a Concept.
