ABSTRACT
C hristian ‘constructions’ though both may be, the turn of a century, let alone that of a millennium, encourages the spirit of retrospection. Given that the post-medieval evolution from predominantly religious to educational travel is so fundamental to an understanding of the origins of the Grand Tour, it seems appropriate to begin a survey compiled in the year 2000 by celebrating the centenary of Herbert Thurston's quintessentially retrospective Holy Year of Jubilee: An Account of the History and Ceremonial of the Roman Jubilee (London, Sands & Co., 1900). Concerned above all with pilgrimage from the time of the first Holy Year of 1300 to his own of December 1899, this learned Jesuit nevertheless quotes so interestingly from several hundred years of travel literature that he almost incidentally documents the development of curiosity as a justification for travel in its own right. He also documents and to some extent analyses the praise of travellers for Roman hospitals, a topic he privileges partly because of his historical controversies with contemporary Protestant historians such as G.G. Coulton. Sands & Co. published an abridged version of Father Thurston's Jubilee Year in 1925. Meanwhile, also in 1900, the romantically named Walter Raleigh, newly promoted to the Chair of English at Glasgow and in 1904 to become the first Professor of English literature at Oxford, published areprint of Sir Thomas Hoby's1561 translation of Castiglione's Cortegiano: The Book of the Courtier (London, David Nutt, 1900). Raleigh's introduction is a model of its kind, summarizing the life and works of Castiglione and of Hoby, before going on to discuss the extraordinary impact of the Courtier on both Italian and English culture. For our purposes, however, most significant is Raleigh's use of Hoby's manuscript autobiography in the then British Museum Library (now BL MS Egerton 2148). At least one late-nineteenth-century copy of this survives in the Osborn collection in the Beinecke Library at Yale (Osborn MS D.184), but it was then so little known that the author of the Dictionary of National Biography entry on Hoby was unaware of it. Raleigh recommended that, ‘for its historical value, if for nothing else, the Diary certainly deserves to be set in print. It is the chief source of the ensuing life of Hoby.’ More than half of this manuscript describes Hoby's fascinatingly proto-typical Grand Tour and, although Raleigh failed to identify Hoby's principal source for his description of Italy, Leandro Alberti's Descrittione di tutta Italia (1550), his comments, such as that on Hoby's Strasbourg sighting of ‘the first English historian of Italy’, William Thomas, are always illuminating. Raleigh's suggestion that the BL manuscript should be published was taken up by Edgar Powell and the Camden Society two years later (see above, p. 137, n. 56).
