ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an account of the Foubert family’s educational endeavours in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Paris and London, setting them in the context of a broader academy movement and its bodily theories of nobility. Searches for ‘Foubert’ and its variant spellings in British, Irish and American archives have indicated useful sources, as have mentions in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the History of Parliament, Early English Books Online, Eighteenth Century Collections Online and the Burney Collection of contemporary newspapers. The chapter draws on these sources to assess the ways in which families used the academy, establishing its position in early modern British and Irish travel culture. It discusses the bodily and mental formation of the nobility and gentry, continuing along Italian Renaissance lines. When Solomon Foubert arrived in London in early 1679, he had already ‘been Master of an Academy at Paris during the space of about twenty years’.
