This collection explores the multifaceted relationship between letters and bodies in the long eighteenth century, featuring a broad selection of women and men’s letters in Britain, North America and the Caribbean, from the labouring poor to the landed elite. In eleven chapters, scholars from various disciplines draw on different methodological approaches that include close readings of single letters, social historical analyses of large corpora and a material culture approach to the object of the letter. This research includes personal letters exchanged among family and friends, formal correspondence and letters that were incorporated into published forewords and appendices, journals and memoirs. Section 1 explores the letter as a substitute for the absent body, the imagined physical encounters and performances envisaged by letter writers and the means through which these imagined sensations were conveyed. Section 2 examines the letter as a material object that served as a conduit for descriptions of the material body and as an instrument for embodied encounters. Section 3 focuses on how correspondents purposefully used their bodies in letters as a means to create intimacy, to generate social networks and build a ‘body politic’. This interdisciplinary volume centred around letters will be of interest to scholars and students in a variety of fields including eighteenth-century studies, cultural history and literature.

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.

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.

The Grand Tour, a customary trip of Europe undertaken by British nobility and wealthy landed gentry during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, played an important role in the formation of contemporary notions of elite masculinity. Examining testimony as written by Grand Tourists, tutors and their families, Goldsmith demonstrates that the Grand Tour educated elite young men in a wide variety of skills, virtues and masculine behaviours that extended well beyond polite society. She argues that dangerous experiences were far more central to the Tour as a means of constructing Britain's next generation of leaders than has previously been examined. Influenced by aristocratic concepts of honour and inspired by military leadership, elites viewed experiences of danger and hardship as powerfully transformative and therefore as central to the process of constructing masculinity. Far from viewing danger as a disruptive force, Grand Tourists willingly tackled a variety of social, geographical and physical perils, gambling their way through treacherous landscapes; scaling mountains, volcanoes and glaciers; and encountering war and disease. Through the study of danger, Goldsmith offers a revision of eighteenth-century elite masculine culture and the critical role the Grand Tour played within this.