Introduction

Abstract

The documents edited in this volume were written during or shortly after missions from Elizabethan England and Jacobean Scotland to the Protestant princes of the Holy Roman Empire and Denmark. Through the particular perspectives of their authors, these accounts provide helpful if general descriptions while offering minute but critical details of two countries hitherto relatively unfamiliar to most sixteenth-century Englishmen and Scots. Much of the intelligence and many of the observations contained in these materials also remain obscure to modern scholarship. This edition is intended to highlight the importance of such information not only to the formation and execution of government policy but also to the intellectual formation and professional trajectory of the authors themselves. Because these documents are relevant to a number of distinct yet related fields of current scholarship, the following introduction offers an overview of English and Scottish diplomacy with Germany and Denmark before addressing the specific missions and authors, trends in diplomatic history, and the nature and purpose of travel writing during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The introduction closes with a discussion of the documents as sources of intelligence, their significance, their locations, the editorial conventions, and the critical apparatus.