Complete Gentlemen

<em>Complete Gentlemen</em> is the first study to look beyond the Italian Grand Tour to the wider culture of educational travel that thrived among British and Irish landowners between 1650 and 1750. Ansell reconstructs dozens of encounters with continental Europe revealing how the varying means ambitions and obligations of families produced widely differing experiences of educational travel. Where historians usually isolate time abroad he pays unprecedented attention to what families thought and did before after and instead of foreign travel stages that uncover its true significance for British and Irish society. This innovative approach requires a deep source base over several generations provided by the manuscript archives of four clusters of families from England and Ireland. Ansell uses these archives to relate travel too often a stand-alone topic to broader questions in social and cultural history exploring the meanings of time abroad for social mobility elite formation <br>landed identity