While educational travel was extremely popular among early modern Englishmen, the practice attracted extensive public criticism. Rather than examining travel itself, this book explores the vivid public images of educational travellers, their development and popularity, and the fears and prejudices in English society that engendered them.
The first part of the book examines the medieval background of English travel abroad, the enthusiasm for educational travel among early modern Englishmen, and the progress of the public debate over the practice which essentially started with the publication of Ascham's The Scholemaster in 1570.
The second part of the book examines each of the seven major images of the educational traveller: the Italianated traveller; the atheistical traveller, the Catholic traveller, the morally corrupt traveller, the culturally corrupt traveller, and the foolish and lying travellers.