Michael G. Brennan is Professor of Renaissance Studies at the School of English, University of Leeds. The Hakluyt Society has previously published two of his other books: The Travel Diary of Robert Bargrave Levant Merchant 1647-1656 (1999) and The Origins of the Grand Tour. The Travels of Robert Montagu, Lord Mandeville (1649-1654), William Hammond (1655-1658), Banaster Maynard (1660-1663) (2004). Both books contain accounts of Venice in the seventeenth century which prompted the compilation of this volume dedicated to earlier accounts of travellers to Venice and Anglo-Venetian relations between 1450 and 1600. He has also served as a series editor and council member of the Hakluyt Society. His other books and articles focus on the extensive sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writings of the Sidney family of Penshurst and, in the twentieth century, the works of Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell.