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The travel guide is a flexible literary category capable of absorbing a broad range of narrative styles and genres. Andrew Boorde’s The Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge (1547) is an eminent example of such fluidity and versatility. On the face of it, the book presents itself like an entertaining precursor to our modern travel guides and phrase books, written by a priest, physician and government informant at the service of Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell. And yet, reflecting the uncertainty and the confusion of the first decade of England’s break with Rome, the book repeatedly intersects with the period’s key concern of negotiating a personal and an English identity, and a place for the self in the midst of many religious and political turbulences both at home and abroad.