Beyond the Grand Tour

Northern Metropolises and Early Modern Travel Behaviour

Rosemary Sweet, Gerrit Verhoeven, Sarah Goldsmith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317174516
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

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.

1
Introduction

Rosemary Sweet, Gerrit Verhoeven and Sarah Goldsmith

In 1997 the Tate Gallery in London organised an exhibition on travel in the eighteenth century called ‘Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy’.¹ Offering a compelling vision of who travelled, their destinations, their preoccupations, their entertainment, their collecting practices and the memorabilia of their travels, the exhibition, with its accompanying catalogue, provides a useful starting point for this volume, embodying as it does the dominant paradigm in Anglophone scholarship on early modern European travel: a British-led consumption of Italy’s art, antiquities and history.²

Echoing numerous other scholarly works, the exhibition defined the Grand Tour as a northern European aristocratic practice. An extended voyage to Rome that represented the culmination of a youth’s education and his passage to adult manhood, the Grand Tour involved sending young noblemen southwards to acquire a taste in the fine arts, to study the remains of Roman antiquity, to improve their command of French or Italian, to hone their diplomatic skills and to master the noble arts of dancing, fencing, horsemanship and conversation. As Bruce Redford argued in his important study Venice and the Grand Tour:

A Grand Tour is not a Grand Tour unless it includes the following; first a young British male patrician (that is, a member of the aristocracy or the gentry); second, a tutor who accompanies his charge throughout the journey; third, a fixed itinerary that makes Rome its principal destination; fourth, a lengthy period of absence, averaging two or three years.³

The Grand Tour was supposedly established by the English and disseminated to other European countries and whereas scholars typically contend that English milordi outnumbered travellers from other nations for most of the eighteenth century, the attraction of Italy was clearly not limited to the English (or British) alone. Indeed, the concept of a ‘Grand Tour’ is recognisable across early modern European cultures and much of the scholarly literature has placed considerable emphasis upon what Cesare de Seta, in his introductory essay to Lure of Italy’s catalogue, referred to as its ‘essentially cosmopolitan’ character and universal qualities.⁴

The dominance of Italy upon early modern patterns of travel – itself a perpetuation of the centrality of pilgrimages to Rome in medieval modes of travel – is impossible to ignore, whether in contemporary observations or modern scholarship. But in recognising the importance of Italy, and Rome in particular, as the ultimate destination of early modern travel, other itineraries and travelling agenda have tended to be overlooked. As Kay Dian Kriz observed in her review of Lure of Italy, the scholarship ‘seems loath to situate the Tour within a larger network of international travel and exchange’.⁵ Instead, an emphasis upon Italy’s ‘uniquely significant’ status as a focus of travel and its ‘unique riches’⁶ has led to a prioritisation of the aesthetic agenda of the Grand Tour in Italy. Within the scholarship devoted to the Italian Grand Tour it is possible to identify two distinct and dominant scholarly discourses. First, the research agenda set by art historians has explored Italy’s importance as the training ground for artists and architects, and stressed the relationship between taste, collecting and patronage, both in tracing the art trade’s networks and in identifying the importance of the aesthetic and classical ideals in elite culture, and the enduring association between the visual arts,⁷ classics and politics.⁸ Second, building upon the works of Charles Batten and Percy Adams, who contended that travel literature formed its own eighteenth-century genre of writing, literature scholars have investigated travel literature’s form, style, conventions and influence. Italy, and its role in the evolution of the novel, the Sublime, Gothic and Romantic literature, has provoked extensive commentary.⁹ As Simon Ditchfield has recently observed, the field is dominated either by an ‘old-fashioned’ history of collecting and connoisseurship, or by a focus on ‘travel writing (that is, narratives, their style and their conventions)’, and questions of subjectivity and narrative. The actual experience of travel and the other dimensions of the history of travel have frequently been excluded.¹⁰

Important though the Italian Grand Tour undoubtedly was, this volume seeks to decentre its place in early modern European travel cultures, directing the focus instead upon other areas of northern, western and central Europe. Considering these regions as travel destinations in their own right, and in terms of the distinctive travel cultures of their inhabitants, it also builds upon recent scholarship that highlights the importance of travel for categories of traveller beyond the stereotypical aristocratic male. Collectively the chapters provide testimony of the growing diversity of different cultures of travel that co-existed alongside the extended itinerary of the traditional Grand Tour. The volume’s objective is to provide a consistent focus upon the praxis and experience of travel as opposed to the research agenda set by art history or literature studies, through presenting a series of in-depth case studies that allows us to identify the diversity of early modern travel by focusing on neglected travellers, itineraries and destinations from France, the southern Netherlands, the Dutch Republic, the German territorial states, Bohemia, Italy and Britain. This builds upon and responds to research and anthologies that have been moving away from the canonical texts of travel literature or well-known editions of published correspondence, by delving into personal diaries, family papers, lists of travel expenses, scrapbooks, diplomatic reports, passport registers and other under-utilised archival sources, as well as printed ephemera on the early modern travel industry.¹¹ As will be discussed later, new themes and cultures of travel have been broached by reading these sources against the grain – for example, by looking for women, children, or domestic servants, who were travelling with, but were almost invisible in the journals written by the patres familias.

Although the existence of destinations beyond Italy has been routinely recognised by the principal studies of the Grand Tour, such recognition rarely goes beyond brief references or narrative-led discussion.¹² This is the more striking when we consider that, in terms of crude numbers, in so far as evidence survives, destinations such as Paris or Spa, the small but fashionably cosmopolitan resort in the Ardennes, attracted visitor numbers comparable or even superior to those to be found in any of the major Italian cities. Daniel Roche, for example, estimates that between 1772 and 1787 approximately 3,800 foreigners visited Paris annually, of which 25 per cent (950) were British, whereas Bates’s analysis of visitor lists shows that during its peak years (1763–87) Spa could attract almost 350 British visitors in the summer months alone.¹³ The same observation can be made for studies of German and Dutch travellers. From the 1980s onwards a flood of coffee-table books, anthologies and articles were published on the Netherlandish Groot Tour, yet Rudolf Dekker’s 1994 detailed inventory of early modern travel manuscripts clearly demonstrates that Italy was being dwarfed by other destinations as early as the late seventeenth century. London and Paris were on the rise, while Dutch travellers also increasingly travelled eastwards to the Rhine, the spa of Aix-la-Chapelle, Berlin and Dresden.¹⁴ For a long time, the German research programme was cut from the same cloth, as attention was primarily focused on Italy and the Kavaliersreisen. Joachim Rees, Winfried Siebers and Hilmar Tilgner’s 2002 inventory of German travel journals from 1750–1800, however, broke new ground, demonstrating that France, not Italy, was the main destination for German nobles and commoners, followed closely by the Austrian Netherlands, the Dutch Republic and, from 1765 onwards, Great Britain.¹⁵ Figures and findings such as these are suggestive of the distortion that the ‘lure’ of Italy has exercised over our understanding of the experience of travel.

Recent decades have seen a slowly developing, disparate but welcome body of scholarship that is less rigidly focused upon the Italian peninsula and which seeks to provide more detailed analysis of specific regions and countries. For example, following Michèle Cohen’s pioneering work, Anglophone historiography has centred upon France’s role within the education and refinement of young gentlemen, upon travel’s role within contemporary debates concerning anti-French and Francophile tendencies, and upon the development of revolutionary travel.¹⁶ Scholars such as Liesbeth Corens, Hugh Dunthorne and Kees van Strien have focused on the relationship between English Catholic institutions in the Low Countries and English travellers or on the close cultural ties between Britain, the Austrian Netherlands and the Dutch Republic.¹⁷ Britain as a travel destination for French, German and other continental travellers, as represented in the accounts of foreign visitors to Britain of both sexes, from Sophie von la Roche and Johanna Schopenhauer to Count Lorenzo Magalotti and Louis Simond, has also received considerable attention.¹⁸ These accounts have been mined by urban historians as well as scholars interested in the delineation of English manners and mores, but have been discussed less frequently from the perspective of patterns of travel behaviour and of the experience of travel.¹⁹ Lucien Bély’s analysis of French passport registers from 1712 offers a highly suggestive indication of this trend whereby, even in the early eighteenth century, Italy had been eclipsed by England – and above all by London – as the most popular travel destination for aristocrats.²⁰ As scholarly discussions of eighteenth-century Anglophilia and its admiration for political liberty and commercial and manufacturing progress demonstrates, a fascination with British culture and modernity was, in many cases, clearly a powerful motivation for travel, just as Italophilia and admiration for antiquity drew Englishmen southwards to Rome.²¹ Admiration for novelty and the pursuit of knowledge and modernity could slip easily into industrial espionage, as meticulous notes were taken on industrial plants, mines, steam engines, agricultural systems, landscape parks and other things was zu Hause Vortheil bringen könne (meaning ‘other things that could be of benefit back at home’).²²

The attention given to the different areas and topographies of northern Europe is, at present, uneven. Certain areas such as the German principalities and the Austro-Hungarian Empire have attracted only limited scholarly attention. David Worthington and Stephen Conway’s recent studies of British and Irish ties with central Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are a rare exception. However, whereas Worthington highlights detailed evidence for British travel to Austria-Hungary and Poland-Lithuania as early as 1560, and Conway’s ‘Grand Tour’ chapter decentred Italy through drawing on a kaleidoscope of northern destinations, their discussions of travel are part of a wider exploration of the connections via trade, diplomacy, military service and intellectual exchange, and their role in shaping British and European identity.²³ In later eighteenth-century scholarship other areas, such as the Alps, spa towns and coastal destinations, have received more consideration. Yet again, this has tended to come from scholars less interested in travel per se than the discourse surrounding cultural and aesthetic attitudes towards mountains,²⁴ or historians of modern tourism seeking to trace back the lineages of the relationship between leisure, health and travel.²⁵ Equally, travel to and travel writing on areas designated as the ‘periphery’ of Europe, such as Russia, Scandinavia and the Levant have been the subject of discussions of the existence, inclusion and exclusion of a ‘European identity’, and the boundaries of civilisation, which have explored the overlap between European travel and the wider culture of exploration.²⁶

As Bolton and McLoughlin recently observed, early modern European travel ‘emerges as a vast panorama of opportunities and experiences far wider than any individual could take in’.²⁷ This observation remains as true for scholars as it did for travellers. Travel acts as an intersection for many disparate scholarly interests, making gaining a cohesive sense of the history and culture of European travel challenging. This volume fills certain lacunae through detailing historiographies, travel cultures and destinations of individual regions. As importantly, in focusing upon northern and central European destinations, these chapters also provide the opportunity to collectively reflect on the overall rationale behind travel to and the attractions of the ‘north’ of Europe. Montesquieu’s theory of climate has often been used to explain the attraction of the north in terms of its characteristic industry and activity. However, this analysis has typically been binary in nature, comparing west to east, north to south, centres to peripheries, or Europe to colonial spaces, and has more often focused on what the north was not.²⁸ Focusing on travel as a central means of testing and consolidating a sense of self, Chloe Chard, for example, argues that European travel was essentially about understanding the north through comparison with the south, rather than in its own right: ‘the traveller’s own country – or the entire north of Europe – is assigned contrasting attributes, such as tameness, insipidness or mediocrity’ in comparison to Italy as a place of escape, pleasure and exhilaration.²⁹

Whereas in certain chapters the binary is reversed, this volume predominantly works against Chard’s emphasis on the necessity of the south or other comparative elements through examining travel in the north, exploring how the north was understood by northern Europeans themselves and identifying a discourse that was capable of operating without a comparative element.³⁰ In identifying the central attractions of the north, this volume collectively finds that whereas art and antiquity were not unimportant – travellers, for example, were almost always fascinated by the burgeoning collections of the Louvre in Paris, the Palais Royal and Versailles, and the baroque paintings in churches and monasteries of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Travel and elite formation
• PART II Travel for leisure and business
• PART III New patterns of travel
• Index