ABSTRACT
This chapter is about the changing perspectives of German travel culture in the age of Enlightenment. It highlights the transformation and adaptation that the classical, late-seventeenth-century Kavalierstour had to undergo to meet the intellectual settings of Enlightenment culture on the basis of one selected journey or rather travel account. The chapter reveals the seemingly opposing agendas of a growing need for professionalisation or rather professional specialisation, on the one hand, and the demand for wide-ranging, encyclopaedic knowledge collecting, on the other. It shows how travellers who were heavily influenced by Pietism opened up new fields of investigation in long-familiar travel destinations. The journey started on 27 July 1731, when the party left Eger (there is no hint as to what they had been doing there) and progressed in a stately fashion towards the German-Dutch border. Despite a generally broad scope of locations to visit and persons to contact, the travellers’ notes reflected a marked preference for certain themes and topics.
