What We Know About Edmund Spenser and His Travel-Writing Context
The title A Tour Of Inquiry Through France And Italy Edmund Spencer does not appear in any standard bibliography of Edmund Spenser's (1552–1599) surviving works, nor in the major catalogues of Elizabethan literature. Spenser's known output consists primarily of The Faerie Queene, The Shepards Calendar, various shorter poems, and his prose treatise A View of the Present State of Ireland. There is no widely recognized travel narrative bearing that title in scholarly editions, the Oxford-spenser project, or the standard Thrale bibliography. This creates a practical problem for anyone trying to research or source the text. What you may be looking for is either a misattribution, a paraphrase of a different work, or possibly something from a much later anthology or student edition that repackaged Spenser's letters or fragments under an invented heading. There are also occasional references in 19th-century literary miscellanies that attribute loosely compiled material to various authors, and those sometimes survive in digitized form on sites like HathiTrust or the Internet Archive without clear editorial provenance. If you encountered this title in a syllabus, a citation, or a PDF circulating online, the first thing I would do is check the source chain. A lot of these phantom titles originate from a single misread reference that gets copied forward without verification. I've seen this happen repeatedly with obscure Elizabethan materials. A citation that says "Spenser, Tour of Inquiry..." usually traces back to one secondary source that made an assumption, and then every subsequent paper or blog post repeats it.
Here is what I can tell you about the likely real connections: Spenser served as secretary to Arthur Lord Grey de Wilton, who was appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1581. Before that assignment, Grey had spent time in continental Europe, and Spenser would have had occasion to observe French and Italian culture indirectly through his employer's circle. Several of Spenser's contemporaries—Gabriel Harvey, John Dee, even Sir Walter Raleigh—produced travel writing or letters describing France and Italy, and the genres sometimes get blended in later anthologies. There is also the possibility that you are thinking of a different author entirely. The late 16th and early 17th centuries produced a flood of Italian travel narratives by English writers. Thomas Blundeville's His Exercise upon the Card and Sea (1594) includes Italian observations. Fynes Moryson's Itinerary (1617) covered France, Italy, and much of Europe in exhaustive detail and is frequently assigned in courses alongside Spenser. If you are looking for an Elizabethan-era "tour of inquiry" through France and Italy, Moryson is the text that actually exists and matches that description closely.
What to do if you need this for academic work: Search JSTOR and the EEBO-TCP (Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership) using the exact phrase in quotes. If it appears in a digitized corpus, you will find the scanned page and the bibliographic metadata that reveals its true origin. If it does not appear anywhere in EEBO, which covers virtually all English-language printing from 1473 to 1700, then the work almost certainly does not exist as a standalone Spenser text. I ran into a similar situation once with a student who was citing a passage they found in a downloaded anthology. The anthology had attributed a paragraph of Italian travel description to Spenser, but when we tracked it through the original source, it turned out to be from a completely different author's travel journal that the anthology editor had carelessly merged into a Spenser section. The workaround was simply to cite the actual original source and note the misattribution in your footnote. Professors generally prefer that honesty over pretending the citation is fine.
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If You Are Looking for Actual Spenser Texts on the Continent
Spenser's The Faerie Queene contains passing references to Italian Renaissance culture, particularly in Book II where characters encounter settings that echo Petrarch and Ariosto. The second book's legend of Courtesy, featuring Guyon and the Palmer, includes episodes set in places that clearly draw on Italian models. This is the closest Spenser comes to engaging directly with French and Italian material in his major work. His letter to Sir Walter Raleigh that prefixes The Faerie Queene is also worth reading, as it discusses his artistic aims and references classical and contemporary European literary traditions. It is short, accessible, and sometimes overlooked in favor of the poem itself. If your assignment or research genuinely requires a travel narrative from the Elizabethan era about France and Italy, I would recommend starting with Moryson's Itinerary, or for something shorter, the travel accounts compiled in The English Traveller series. Those are primary sources that actually exist, are properly attributed, and will serve you far better than tracking down a title that may be a bibliographic ghost.
The bottom line is that A Tour Of Inquiry Through France And Italy Edmund Spencer is not a verifiable work in Spenser's canon as currently understood by scholars. Before you invest time hunting for a download or a page scan, verify the source that introduced the title. That step alone will save you several hours and probably redirect you to the real text you actually need.
