The Rise of the Grand Tour: Higher Education, Transcultural Desire and the Fear of Cultural Hybridisation

Although the Grand Tour is often implicitly circumscribed to the (long) eighteenth century, its origins actually date back to the sixteenth, as previously argued by Edward Chaney and Michael Brennan. The present article aims to reassess the complex role travel played in the education of the early modern elite, notably the contrasting responses this new social phenomenon elicited. While the crown actively fostered transnational experiences, regarding them as conducive to political and diplomatic wisdom, scholars and playwrights presented this form of transculturation as the fall from a condition of purity. Preoccupations concerning the newly acquired national and religious identity of England and Britain mingle in these texts with reflections on language, manners and morals. This anti-cosmopolitan campaign takes on different nuances, alternatively stigmatising the travellers’ affectation and portraying them as devilish. In the first half of the seventeenth century, however, a new paradigm of knowledge as pragmatically based on experience asserted itself, as shown by Francis Bacon’s works. This lead to a reassessment of travelling as a useful social practice and ultimately to the systematisation of the traveller’s gaze, as shown – among others – by the proceedings of the Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge. Moreover, the pressure the Ottoman Empire exerted on the Eastern borders of Europe contributed to alert Britons to a new religious and cultural faultline, prompting them to reassess their perception of intra-European differences.