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.