The term artes apodemicae refers to a type of travel literature that circulated widely in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: practical manuals with advice for would-be travelers, as opposed to the better-known and more widely studied corpora of travel accounts, produced after the event. The term was coined in the 1980s by Julian Stagl, who authored the first bibliography of these texts (1983). In the first chapter, Stagl retraces the genesis of the genre, which emerged in the Germanic cultural and linguistic area when a group of humanists set out a protocol for travelers to observe in order to gather various types of knowledge while traveling through the Western world. The aim of these peregrinationes was double: to contribute to this humanistic program of knowledge of the main urban and university centers of Europe, their history, and the scholarly work that was being done there, but also to improve oneself through the acquisition of such Stoic values as self-knowledge, virtue, and a sense of public duty, encapsulated by the Ciceronian ideal of prudentia and embodied by the figure of Ulysses, the “icon of worldly experience and wisdom” (107). The widely reproduced letter of Justus Lipsius to the young nobleman Philippe de Lannoy, analyzed here by Jan Papy, is one of the key documents in which these themes were developed.

As these manuals spawned ever more detailed travel reports, the utilitarian and humanistic purpose of such enterprises gradually declined, and a new type of traveler emerged: one whose focus was more on self-improvement and the acquisition of an international network. Karl Enenkel's analysis of Georgius Loysius's Pervigilium Mercurii demonstrates how the original artes apodemicae merged with a different type of text, artes aulicae, or books for courtiers. The question of the conflation of books for courtiers and for travelers, producing manuals aimed at training savvy young noblemen, is also studied by Gábor Gélleri, whose use of French sources not only brings a welcome international perspective to these questions but also enables them to be considered in a broader cultural and historico-philosophical framework (with reference, notably, to the change in paradigm outlined in Paul Hazard's seminal work, The Crisis of the European Mind). Gelléri's chapter also highlights the interest of academic dissertations as a source, something that is further developed by Robert Seidel, who sees these documents as a useful source of information on the contemporary ethical and little-studied legal aspects of traveling.

Not all travels were undertaken, however, by humanists eager to acquire certain types of cultural knowledge or by aspiring diplomats. The chapters by Thomas Haye and by Bernd Roling focus, respectively, on the medical pilgrimage undertaken by Lorenz Gryll in search of local knowledge of medical and pharmaceutical practices, and on the voyage to Canada of a student of Linnaeus, who applied his master's strict observation protocols not only to the region's fauna and flora but also to the local populations.

These chapters make up the first part, in which most of the theoretical issues concerning the genre of the artes apodemicae—its chronological limits, its characteristics, the corpora concerned, and the way in which these texts were produced, circulated, evolved, and were received—are covered. The second part includes studies of a more limited and local nature: the genre of English travel companions, guides to Rome and Naples, the use of collections of epigraphs and epitaphs, and the development of travel guides not for going abroad but to discover one's own country. The two final chapters deal with voyages to Turkey through a Neo-Latin travel poem written by a student of medicine on a diplomatic mission to Istanbul, and a collection of illustrations of Ottoman dress produced at the time of Louis XIV.

The book suffers from the usual problems that occur when conference papers are reconditioned as a collective volume: patchy coverage of some areas, articles whose link to the central theme is rather tenuous, repetitions (especially in the bibliographies), and key concepts sometimes not explained until several chapters into the volume. Although the pan-European dimension of the question is somewhat lacking, the book nevertheless provides the necessary background, an in-depth discussion of the main issues, a great deal of useful bibliography, a variety of analytical approaches, and much that is transferable for enlarging the field of inquiry to other cultural and linguistic areas and to other types of corpora.