Enfilade

From Pen and Sword History:

Julie Peakman, ed., Travellers in Eighteenth-Century Europe: The Sexes Abroad (Barnsley: Pen and Sword History, 2024), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1399049603, £25 / $50.

A collection of essays by leading scholars brought together by Julie Peakman, an expert in eighteenth-century culture.

The Grand Tour was considered a part of the education of a young gentleman. Travellers included blossoming scholars, poets, writers, and scientists. Visits were made to Greece and Italy via France and Switzerland, often taking in Turkey. But women also travelled extensively, though these accounts have been under-explored. This collection of essays examines first-hand accounts of the impact of foreign travel on both women and men, as seen through their letters, travel diaries, journals, and their creative response in poems, music, and art. Its originality is seen in its exploration of a comparison between the views of women and men abroad and the differences in what they deemed interesting and worthy of comment. The book is especially relevant in light of the many past (and current) xenophobic views of the ‘foreigner’. Here, we more often see travellers viewing their experience of ‘otherness’ and exoticism, in a positive light, a cultural appreciation rather than a cultural appropriation. This book examines how men and women saw these new worlds opening up before them, what delighted them, what influenced them, and their interaction with others in the light of domesticity, antiquity, politics, work, science, sex, and friendships.

Julie Peakman is an historian, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Honorary Fellow at the Department of History, Classics, and Archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London. She contributes regularly to newspapers, popular and academic journals and has worked on various documentaries for TV including for the BBC, Sky, Channel 4, and the Biography channel. She is a prolific author in the areas of eighteenth-century culture, history of sexuality, and social history. Her books include Libertine London, Licentious Worlds; The Pleasure’s All Mine; Amatory Pleasures, Lascivious Bodies; and Mighty Lewd Books: The Development of Pornography in Eighteenth-Century England; along with biographies of Dublin brothel-keeper Peg Plunket and Emma Hamilton.