This article is a journey through the lesser known travel diaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its intent is to underline the occurence of violent images along the European roads, particularly in Italy, Spain, France, and England. Criminality, danger, and violence are all common phenomenons in the Renaissance. Travelling allows one to discover the foreign but not without hardship: avoiding bandit and corsair traps, travellers are then welcomed at the entrance of the cities by gallows adorned with corpses and are entertained, if they so desire, with executions and autodafés. Travel literature depicts a violent and bloody Renaissance.

Les chercheurs doivent citer ce travail comme suit :

• Monga, L., (2025), "Crime and the Road: A Survey of Sixteenth-Century Travel Journals", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Monga, Luigi. "Crime and the Road: A Survey of Sixteenth-Century Travel Journals." Renaissance and Reformation 34 (2): 2010. 5-17. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v34i2.10832. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.