Thomas Coryate, the self-proclaimed "Peregrine of Odcombe" or "Odcombian Leg-stretcher," was renowned in his day first for having toured Europe largely on foot and, afterward, for traveling through the lands of classical and biblical antiquity and portions of the Ottoman Empire and visiting the court of the Great Mogul before dying in India at around age forty. Through his books, letters, and orations he was a tireless self-promoter, so laboriously fashioning for himself the image of the learned wit that he was as often the butt of jokes as the author of them. Coryate is best understood, however, as a comic or bourgeois Faustus: a tireless inquisitor whose pride in his investigations is tempered by his own self-mocking humor or undercut by the oftentimes pedestrian nature of his interests.

Despite contradictory evidence, Coryate was probably born in Odcombe, Somerset, sometime between 25 June and 29 September in either 1577 or 1579. He...