Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the relationships of the traditional muses in both historical context and for their potential use by historians. The understanding of an historical mindset from a scientific view, informed by the culture of its own time, is an exceedingly difficult task. However, Shron’s analysis and synthesis of several competing schools of scientific and historical thought on the topic provide an invaluable contribution. The book historicizes different kinds of movement, specifically early modern state-sanctioned travel for political purposes and leisure travel in the modern period, to see how they reveal artifacts of everyday life and contribute to the cultures in which they operated. The ability to move about the world reveals changing degrees of political power and individual agency, often in contravention of existing social and cultural norms.