Focusing upon three previously unpublished accounts of youthful English
travellers in Western Europe (in contrast to the renowned but maturely
retrospective memoirs of other seventeenth-century figures such as John
Evelyn), this study reassesses the early origins of the cultural
phenomenon known as the 'Grand Tour'. Usually denoted primarily as a
post-Restoration and eighteenth-century activity, the basis of the long
term English fascination with the 'Grand Tour' was firmly rooted in the
mid-Tudor and early-Stuart periods. Such travels were usually prompted
by one of three reasons: the practical needs of diplomacy, the aesthetic
allure of cultural tourism, and the expediencies of political or
religious exile. The outbreak of the English Civil War during the
late-1640s acted as a powerful stimulus to this kind of travel for male
members of both royalist and parliamentarian families, as a means of
distancing them from the social upheavals back home as well as
broadening their intellectual horizons. The extensive editorial
introductions to this publication of the experiences of three young
Englishmen also consider how their travel records have survived in a
variety of literary forms, including personal diaries (Montagu), family
letters (Hammond) and formal prose records (Maynard's travels were
written up by his servant, Robert Moody), and how these texts should now
be interpreted not in isolation but alongside the diverse collections of
prints, engravings, curiosities, coins and antiquities assembled by such
travellers.
