- Overview
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Get a vivid look at 18th-century Europe through this essential journey of the educated elites in the first educational guide of the grand tour that gave birth to European intellects.
- Book Intro
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In this book, historian Seol Hyesim vividly recreates 18th-century Europe in a sweeping grand tour, the first educational tour experience of its kind. This tour has been a privilege enjoyed only by a few elites who have gone on these travels to further their areas of expertise and knowledge. By tracing their paths, we can learn more about the educational experiences of modern Europe and the travels through the countries of this fascinating continent.
The grand tour begins in Great Britain in the late 17th century, after the religious conflict that rocked the continent had subsided somewhat, bringing political stability and economic prosperity to the land. When the university education offered at such institutions as Cambridge or Oxford could not keep up with the changes of the times, the British elites sent their young children to study in France and Italy to learn foreign languages and become well-versed in the customs they deemed to be more sophisticated. These travels were the precursor to group travel, packaged tours, foreign language study trips, and early overseas educational trips that we see in contemporary life today.
The grand tour that traveled across the European continent, including France and Italy, averaged two to three years in each country, and gave birth to the greatest of European thinkers and artists who later laid the cornerstone for modern Europe through their various relationships and knowledge of culture and the arts. Nobles as well as Europe's greatest thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, Voltaire, and Goethe participated in such travels, and this grand tour established itself as the final stages of the elite education.
The grand tour has its historical significance in establishing the foundations of modern Europe by allowing for extensive, cross-border relationships, networking for development in the arts and architecture, and the dissemination of Enlightenment thinking, but it has gone largely ignored by world historians. The author has done extensive research into the travel guides, educational materials, and newspaper op-eds of the times, along with the travelers' journals and diaries, letters written home to their parents, and records kept by their teachers and servants, to provide a dimensional look at the birth of the grand tour and modern Europe.
Through this extraordinary and majestic journey that tells us so much about early modern Europe and the education of its elites, as well as the travelogues of Europe's best-known travelers and the human side of the greatest European thinkers, readers can get a better appreciation of a different side of Europe in the early modern era.
- About the Author
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Seol Hyesim
The writer graduated from Yonsei University with a degree in history and earned a doctorate at UC Irvine with her study on "the commercialization of British hot springs from the 16th to the 17th century." She is now a history professor at Yonsei University. She believes that everything in our lives can be the subject of history, and constantly tries to communicate with readers on the topics that are familiar but not easily encountered in history books, with a focus on people’s lives.