Ye Oldest Diarie of Englysshe Travell

4to. pp. xxxvi, 72.

A recent undated facsimile of the Bodleian copy of the Leadenhall Press original. Torkington’s diary is itself a genuine 16th-century manuscript (British Library MS Add. 28,561) by a Norfolk parson, of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land via Venice, Corfu, Zante, Cerigo, and Crete. But while parts of his journal may be veracious, others, notably the descriptions of Crete, Venice, Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Bethlehem, were literally plagiarized from contemporary printed and manuscript accounts. This led the Camden Society in the 1850s to cancel its intended publication of the diary, mooted since 1840 (Robert Bell Wheler had published extracts in 1812), and leave it to the ‘Ye Olde’ antiquarianism of the Leadenhall Press. The question of how much of Torkington’s travels are anything but imaginary remains uncertain. See R. J. Howgego, Encyclopedia of exploration: invented and apocryphal narratives of travel. Potts Point, New South Wales, 2013, T13.

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