ABSTRACT
An exploration of early modern travel culture offers the chance to consider diverse outlooks and practices related to European voyages, rather than simply to examine journeys in isolation. The opportunity is welcome because historians tend to remove travellers from the contexts in which they understood and undertook foreign experience. Studies of travel from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England or Britain usually begin as young men arrive in continental Europe and typically end as they re-cross the Channel. 1 Journeys appear divorced from family circumstances and strategies, which dictated whether young men left home at all and shaped the forms of travel pursued by those who ventured abroad. Why did some undertake continental travel while others did not? How did travellers prepare for foreign encounters? What alternatives were there for those who remained in Britain and Ireland? Such questions rarely appear in studies of travel, but they should feature prominently in explorations of travel culture. 2
