Beyond the Grand Tour: Northern Metropolises and Early Modern Travel Behaviour

Description

Travel in early modern Europe is frequently represented as synonymous with the institution of the Grand Tour, a journey undertaken by elite young males from northern Europe to the centres of the arts and antiquity in Italy. Taking a somewhat different perspective, this volume builds upon recent research that pushes beyond this narrow orthodoxy and which decentres Italy as the ultimate destination of European travellers. Instead, it explores a much broader pattern of travel, undertaken by people of varied backgrounds and with divergent motives for travelling. By tapping into current reactions against the reification of the Grand Tour as a unique and distinctive practice, this volume represents an important contribution to the ongoing process of resituating the Grand Tour as part of a wider context of travel and topographicalmwriting. Focusing upon practices of travel in northern and western Europe rather than in Italy, particularly in Britain, the Low Countries and Germany, the essays in this collection highlight how itineraries continually evolved in response to changing political, economic and intellectual contexts. In so doing, the reasons for travel in northern Europe are subjected to a similar level of detailed analysis as has previously only been directed on Italy. By doing this, the volume demonstrates the variety of travel experiences, including the many shorter journeys made for pleasure, health, education and business undertaken by travellers of varying age and background across the period. In this way the volume brings to the fore the experiences of varied categories of traveller – from children to businessmen – which have traditionally been largely invisible in the historiography of travel. Cover......Page 1 Title......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 Contents......Page 6 List of figures and tables......Page 8 List of contributors......Page 9 1 Introduction......Page 12 PART I Travel and elite formation......Page 36 2 The Duc de Rohan’s Voiage of 1600: Gallocentric travel to England in the formation of a French noble......Page 38 3 Foubert’s academy: British and Irish elite formation in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Paris and London......Page 57 4 The social challenge: Northern and central European societies on the eighteenth-century aristocratic Grand Tour......Page 76 5 Abroad, or still ‘at home’? Young noblemen from the Czech lands and the empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries......Page 94 6 Between specialisation and encyclopaedic knowledge: Educational travelling and court culture in early eighteenth-century Germany......Page 119 PART II Travel for leisure and business......Page 136 7 The Petit Tour to Spa, 1763–87......Page 138 8 Amsterdam as global market and meeting place of nations: Perspectives of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French travellers in Holland......Page 158 9 The European ‘Grand Tour’ of Italian entrepreneurs......Page 172 PART III New patterns of travel......Page 194 10 Young cosmopolitans: Flemish and Dutch youths and their travel behaviour (from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth century)......Page 196 11 Revolutionary ruins: The reimagination of French touristic sites during the Peace of Amiens......Page 214 Index......Page 233