ABSTRACT
Scholars have increasingly focused on the much-neglected aspect of gender in early modern travel literature, identifying distinct female voices and analysing masculinity and masculine self-fashioning. There are several reasons why women did not travel as much as men. Firstly, itinerant women did not fit within the contemporary system of male and female duties in the household. Men crossed the country’s borders for utilitarian motives, while women stayed behind to run the household. Travel for travel’s sake was uncommon. According to Gerrit Verhoeven, who has meticulously investigated this new mode of travel, in the grand genealogy of mobility, leisure trips can be placed somewhere between the Grand Tour and modern tourism. Female travelling companions played a leading role in the 1669 account of Cornelis de Jonge van Ellemeet, one of the earliest recorded summer jaunts. Adriana de la Court, the daughter of a rich textile merchant from Leiden, is an interesting example of a female travel author.
