This thesis argues that seventeenth-century English travellers drew on the precepts of rhetorical invention to understand and describe their experiences on the road. It focusses on the writings of Thomas Coryate, Henry Blount, William Scott, John Cartwright, and Edward Terry, all of whom travelled to the ‘Old World’ (Africa, Europe, and Asia, as opposed to the ‘New World’ of the Americas) for diplomatic, mercantile, and religious purposes in the period before 1660. It reconstructs aspects ...