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

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 topographical writing. 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 the 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 levelled on Italy. By doing this, the volume demonstrates the variety of travel experiences, including the many shorter and 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.

Sarah Goldsmith is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate in the Department of History, University of York, researching the role of danger, risk and masculinity in the British Grand Tour to the Continent, c. 1730-1780. She has an article forthcoming in the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies on ’Dogs, Servants and Masculinities: Writing about Danger on the Grand Tour’. Roey Sweet is professor of Urban History at the School of History, University of Leicester. She has published widely on eighteenth-century urban and cultural history, and her most recent book, Cities and the Grand Tour: the British in Italy, c.1690-1820 was published by Cambridge University Press in 2012. She is co-editor of the Urban History journal and a member of the organising committee of the European Association of Urban Historians. Gerrit Verhoeven lectures in early modern history at the universities of Antwerp, Ghent and Leiden. He specializes in social and cultural history of the Low Countries. His new book Europe within Reach. Netherlandish travellers on the Grand Tour and Beyond (1585-1750) is published by Brill.