His account of his European sojourn, published as Coryats Crudities (1611), has earned Thomas Coryate a place in the history of English literature as an entertaining writer, a coiner of words, an eccentric wit, and an astute observer. Panegyrics contributed to the work, and Coryate's letters from abroad show that he knew many of the celebrities of his time, among them the writers Ben Jonson and John Donne, the architect Inigo Jones, and the diplomat Sir Thomas Roe. His allusions to meetings of a club at the Mermaid Tavern, the gathering place for many of the leading writers of the day, constitute the earliest indisputable contemporary evidence of the club's existence. Although an early death in India prevented him from writing a book about his second major journey, his surviving notes and letters project vivid pictures of Constantinople, the Levant of the Ottoman Empire, and the court of the...