Travel for reasons of education and leisure became an increasingly widespread elite activity in early modern Europe, culminating in the so-called Grand Tour undertaken by young male members of the British aristocracy and gentry particularly in the eighteenth century. The expansion of secular travel was accompanied by the development of the genre of advice on the art of travel, which sought to instruct travellers how to make their journeys most useful to themselves and their home society whilst fending off the threat of moral corruption associated with excessive exposure to foreign norms. This strongly classist and gendered discourse offers insight in the practice and theory of travel, showing how debates on how to travel reflected Humanist and Enlightenment ideals of cosmopolitanism as well as more narrow conceptions of elite masculinity, national identity, and the "travelling self".

Core Readings (pick two)

Gábor Gelléri, 'Ars apodemica Gendered: Female Advice on Travel', in: Gábor Gélleri and Rachel Willie (eds.), Travel and Conflict in the Early Modern World (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 205-225. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Sarah Goldsmith, 'Nostalgia, Homesickness and Emotional Formation on the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour', Cultural and Social History 15.3 (2018), pp. 333-360. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Bracewell, Wendy, 'Arguing from Experience: Travelees versus Travelers in Early Modern Exchanges', Renaissance Studies 33.4 (2019), pp. 548-567. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Primary source

Leopold Berchtold, An Essay to Direct and Extend the Inquiries of Patriotic Travellers (London: 1789), pp. 1-87 (Read Section I (pp. 1-18) plus leaf through the rest and read one further section in detail). LinkLink opens in a new window or LinkLink opens in a new window.

Further Reading

Blanton, Casey, Travel Writing: The Self and the World (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 1-29. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Bohls, Elizabeth, and Ian Duncan (eds.), Travel Writing 1700-1830: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). LinkLink opens in a new window. [Primary source excerpts]

Carey, Daniel, 'Hakluyt's instructions: The Principal Navigations and sixteenth-century travel advice', Studies in Travel Writing 13 (2009), pp. 167-185. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Carey, Daniel, 'Advice on the Art of Travel', in: Nandini Das and Tim Youngs (eds.), The Cambridge History of Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 392-407. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Colbert, Benjamin (ed.), Travel Writing and Tourism in Britain and Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Dolan, Brian, Ladies of the Grand Tour (London: Harper Collins, 2001). Library.

Enenkel, Karl A.E., and Jan de Jong (eds.), Artes Apodemicae and Early Modern Travel Culture, 1550-1700 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Games, Alison, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Gélleri, Gábor, Lessons of Travel in Eighteenth-Century France: From Grand Tour to School Trips (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2020). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Gleadhill, Emma, 'Improving Upon Birth, Marriage and Divorce: The Cultural Capital of Three Late Eighteenth-Century Female Grand Tourists', Journal of Tourism History 10.1 (2018), pp. 21-36. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Goldsmith, Sarah, Masculinity and Danger on the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour (London: University of London Press, 2020). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Holmberg, Eva Johanna, 'Writing the Travel Companion in Seventeenth-Century English Texts about the Ottoman Empire', in: Helen Hackett (ed.), Early Modern Exchanges : Dialogues Between Nations and Cultures, 1550-1750 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 183-198. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Holmberg, Eva Johanna, 'Writing the travelling self: travel and life-writing in Peter Mundy’s (1597–1667) Itinerarium Mundii', Renaissance Studies 31.4 (2016), pp. 608-625. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Korte, Barbara, 'Practices and Purposes', Barbara Schaff (ed.), Handbook of British Travel Writing (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2020), pp. 95-112. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Pirbhai, M. Reza, 'Empire and I: Reading the Travelogue of a Late Eighteenth Century British Army Captain', South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 36.4 (2013), pp. 661-77. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Porter, Dennis, Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), esp. Ch. 1: Uses of the Grand Tour: Boswell and His Contemporaries', pp. 25-68. LinkLink opens in a new window

Rubiés, Joan Pau, 'Instructions for Travellers: Teaching the Eye to See', History and Anthropology (1996), pp. 139-190. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Schaff, Barbara, 'James Boswell, Journals and Letters from his Grand Tour (1764-1765)', in: Barbara Schaff (ed.), Handbook of British Travel Writing (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2020), pp. 231-264. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Stagl, Justin, A History of Curiosity: the Theory of Travel, 1550-1800 (Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995). LibraryLink opens in a new window.

Sweet, Rosemary, Cities and the Grand Tour: The British in Italy, c.1690–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Sweet, Rosemary, Gerrit Verhoeven and Sarah Goldsmith (eds.), Beyond the Grand Tour: Northern Metropolises and Early Modern Travel Behaviour (London: Routledge, 2017). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Thompson, Carl, The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), Ch. 1: 'Tourists: Diversification and Disdain, 1760–1830', pp. 31-58. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Thompson, C.W., French Romantic Travel Writing: Chateaubriand to Nerval (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Warneke, Sara, Images of the Educational Traveller in Early Modern England (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1995). Library.

Williams, Mark R.F., 'The Inner Lives of Early Modern Travel', The Historical Journal 62.2 (2019), pp. 349-373. LinkLink opens in a new window.

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