IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 272

For about a century and a half, roughly from the middle of the seventeenth century until the last decades of the eighteenth, wealthy families in northern Europe sent their adolescent sons on a long journey through France and Italy. The journey was regarded as the final stage of a gentleman's education, and it acquired a name of its own: the Grand Tour. Those who completed it returned home with languages, manners, sketches and crates of sculpture, and often with a sense of superiority over neighbours who had never crossed the Channel.

The phrase itself is usually traced to Richard Lassels, a Catholic priest who had accompanied several young noblemen abroad and whose guide to Italy was published in 1670, two years after his death. Lassels set out the case for travel as a form of instruction rather than mere diversion, and the book was read by families who needed persuading that the cost and the danger were worthwhile. The fashion spread quickly. By the early eighteenth century a young man of good family was expected to spend two or three years abroad, usually between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one, in the company of a tutor known as a governor.

Paris came first. There a young traveller might take lessons in French, dancing, fencing and riding, and learn how to behave in polite company; the city's academies and drawing masters depended heavily on foreign pupils. Only then did the party cross the Alps, by one of the high passes, and descend into Italy. Turin, Florence, Rome, Venice and Naples formed the classic sequence, with Rome as the climax, since it offered the ruins of antiquity, the palaces of the cardinals and the largest concentration of artists in Europe. A few went further, to Sicily or to the Greek islands.

Travel of this kind was possible only because of a network of contacts. Letters of introduction, carried in bundles and delivered on arrival, allowed a stranger to present himself to an ambassador, a noble household or a merchant with local knowledge, and in this way the tour functioned as an education in diplomacy as much as in art. Parents hoped that their sons would acquire poise, a working knowledge of several languages and useful friendships, and that the experience would fit them for public life at home.

Souvenirs were part of the purpose. Travellers bought antique statues and busts, cameos and coins, and sat for their portraits in front of the objects they had collected; the Roman painter Pompeo Batoni made a speciality of such pictures, in which a young man in a fine coat leans on a broken column or gestures towards a map of Italy. In Venice, visitors queued for views of the canals by Giovanni Antonio Canal, known as Canaletto, and his followers, because a painting of the Grand Canal was the perfect proof that one had been there. Marble chimneypieces, plaster casts and portfolios of prints followed the travellers home.

The practical difficulties were considerable. A crossing of the Alps in a carriage might involve dismantling the vehicle and carrying it in pieces over a pass, and the sea route from Italy to France or the Low Countries depended on winds that could keep a ship in port for weeks. Inns varied from the excellent to the filthy; roads were often little better than tracks; and illness could strike far from home. Many travellers kept journals in which discomfort, bad food and extortionate bills occupy as much space as the wonders of Rome.

Parents, meanwhile, had other anxieties. Advice books warned that a young man without firm principles would find in Paris or Venice opportunities for gambling, drinking and intrigue that would undo the benefits of travel, and that a weak or inexperienced governor might be unable or unwilling to restrain him. Some tours were abandoned early; others turned into years of idleness. The surviving letters of tutors suggest that the struggle to keep a rich young man at his Italian grammar, or out of a card game, was a familiar one.

During the eighteenth century the tour became less exclusively aristocratic. The sons of merchants, lawyers and clergymen began to appear in the same cities, and women, too, travelled in increasing numbers, often with their husbands or in the care of relatives. Costs fell as coaching services improved and as more inns catered for foreign visitors, but a tour remained expensive, and the difference between a modest journey of a few months and the luxurious progress of an heir to a great estate grew wider.

The tradition did not survive the French Revolution. When war broke out between France and much of Europe in 1792, continental travel became dangerous and then, for British travellers, largely impossible, and although the peace of 1815 reopened the roads, the world had changed. Railways and steamships made travel cheaper and faster but also less exceptional, and the word tourist, which came into use around 1800, described a new kind of visitor. The grand tour of the eighteenth century had been an education in being different from other people; the excursions of the Victorian middle class were something else.

Its legacy is visible in the country houses of Britain and Ireland, where the sculpture galleries and the picture collections assembled on tour still hang, and in the neoclassical architecture that those travellers commissioned on their return. It survives, too, in an idea: that a period of travel at a particular age can be formative, and that leaving home is a way of learning who one is.

Before the invention of printing with movable type in the middle of the fifteenth century, every book in Europe was a handmade object, and every copy of a text differed slightly from every other. The most costly element was not the writing but the material: nearly all books were written on parchment, a prepared skin of a calf, sheep or goat, which had replaced the papyrus of the ancient world. Preparing that skin, making the inks and paints, and copying the text by hand together made a single volume the work of many weeks.

Parchment was made by soaking the skin in a bath of lime, which loosened the hair and softened the fibres, then stretching it on a wooden frame while it was still wet. A curved knife was used to scrape away hair and flesh, and the surface was rubbed down with pumice once the skin had dried under tension.

The result was thin and durable, but it responded to changes in the air: a page of parchment absorbs moisture and swells, so a book made of it will not lie flat unless it is bound with care. Vellum, strictly the skin of a calf, was the finest grade and was reserved for luxury volumes.

Writing was done with a quill cut from a goose feather and with ink made from oak galls, iron sulphate and gum arabic. This ink was pale when applied and darkened as it dried, and over centuries it has often turned from black to a warm brown, which is why the oldest manuscripts look the way they do. Coloured paints were prepared separately. Red was used for headings and for the opening words of sections, and blue, green and gold for more ambitious pages; ultramarine, ground from lapis lazuli imported from Central Asia, was so expensive that it was kept for the most valuable books.

A large book was not written as a single block of pages. The scribe worked on folded sheets, each of which formed two leaves of the finished volume, and several of these sheets were gathered into a bundle known as a quire. Before writing began, the quire was pricked at the edges and ruled with a hard point or a lead point, so that the lines of text ran straight and the margins stayed even. Scribes added small numbers or catchwords at the foot of each quire to help the binder put the sections in the right order.

For centuries the main centres of production were monasteries. A room set aside for copying, the scriptorium, might hold a dozen scribes at desks, working in silence or to the sound of a reader, and the rule of some orders required monks to spend part of each day at this task. Monastic scribes developed distinctive styles of handwriting, from the rounded letters of the early medieval books to the dense, angular script of the thirteenth century, which packed more words onto expensive parchment. Manuscripts were also produced in cathedral schools, at royal courts and, increasingly, by professional scribes working for payment.

Copying was slow and punishing. A scribe might complete only a few pages in a day, and haste produced errors that had to be corrected afterwards. To save both time and space, scribes used a large repertoire of abbreviations, leaving out letters and adding a small stroke or symbol above the line; readers were expected to know these conventions, and scholars still argue about how some of them should be expanded. At the end of a volume a scribe sometimes added a colophon, a short note giving the date, the place and the name of the copyist, and occasionally a complaint about the cold or the poor light.

From the thirteenth century, as universities grew and demand for books increased, production moved decisively into the towns. Stationers in Paris, Bologna and Oxford organised the copying of set texts for students by a system known as the pecia. An approved copy of a work was divided into numbered quires and rented out, one at a time, to scribes, who copied each section and returned it; the stationer could thus check the accuracy of the text and produce many copies quickly. Work was divided between specialists: one person ruled the page, another wrote the text, a third added the coloured initials.

Historians know about these practices from several kinds of evidence. Colophons name individual scribes and give dates, and contracts between stationers and customers sometimes survive, setting out the price, the script and the deadline. Pictures of scribes at work appear in the manuscripts themselves, though they are often conventional rather than accurate. In recent decades, laboratory techniques have added a new dimension: protein analysis can identify the species of animal used for a particular leaf, and imaging under different wavelengths can reveal writing that has been erased and written over.

Yet the evidence has limits. Most manuscripts have not survived: parchment was expensive and was often reused, and the pages of an unwanted book could be scraped clean and used again, producing what is called a palimpsest. What remains is therefore biased towards the valuable and the durable, and the everyday books of ordinary people are largely lost. Scholars also disagree about how much copying was done by women. Records of convents show that nuns copied books, and a few names in colophons are female, but the proportion of women among professional scribes remains uncertain.

Every few years a statue becomes a public argument. Campaigns to remove memorials to people who profited from slavery or from empire have been met with the objection that we cannot apply the values of the present to the past. To do so, it is said, is presentism, a failure of historical imagination that turns the dead into defendants in a court that did not exist in their lifetime. The charge has force. Yet it is also used so loosely, and so often, that it threatens to make any moral response to history appear naive. It is worth asking, then, whether judging the past by the present is always a mistake.

The strongest version of the objection was made nearly a century ago. In The Whig Interpretation of History, published in 1931, Herbert Butterfield attacked historians who organised the past around the present, praising the figures who seemed to point towards modern freedoms and blaming those who held them back. Such history, he argued, is written backwards. It ignores what people in the past were actually trying to do, judges them by outcomes they could not have foreseen, and flatters the historian's own age by making it the standard of reason. Butterfield's complaint was as much about method as about morality, but the lesson was clear: the historian should explain, not sit in judgement.

Two later developments sharpened the point. R. G. Collingwood argued that the historian's task is not merely to establish what happened but to think again the thoughts of the people involved, to see their choices from the inside. Quentin Skinner, writing about the history of ideas, showed that the meaning of a text depends on the conventions available to its author: a statement about the duty of obedience meant something different in a world where kings ruled by divine right from what it would mean today. To read a sixteenth-century writer as though they were taking part in a modern debate is, on this view, to misread them.

These are not merely academic worries. A history that measures everything by present values encourages a comfortable story in which the past is a record of error from which we have escaped. It makes moral seriousness easy, because all the difficult judgements lie safely in the past; it rarely asks what our own descendants will find indefensible in us. Anachronistic contempt is also lazy: it spares the effort of understanding how intelligent people could have thought as they did.

But the argument proves less than it seems to. To explain why a person acted as they did is not to approve of what they did. Historians of slavery, of torture or of the treatment of children in factories explain a great deal about the economic and social pressures behind such practices, and no explanation obliges them to conclude that these practices were acceptable. If it did, the same logic would forbid us from criticising anything done by a powerful group in our own society, since there is always some explanation available.

The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce went further. All history, he maintained, is in effect contemporary history: we ask the questions that concern us now, using categories we have inherited, and no historian can step outside their own moment to view the past from nowhere. If Croce is right, the ideal of a wholly detached account, innocent of present concerns, is an illusion. The choice is not between judging and not judging but between judging consciously and judging by accident.

Nor were past societies the unanimous communities that the phrase 'the standards of the time' implies. Objections were made, more or less constantly, to slavery, to the subjection of women, to the killing of heretics and to the exploitation of the poor. Those objections were often silenced, and the record was largely written by those who held power. When we appeal to the standards of the age, we usually mean the standards of its rulers. Scepticism about present-day judgement is healthy; the claim that we should adopt the values of another century wholesale is not a principle but a way of closing an argument.

A further distinction is needed. Deciding whether a statue should remain in a public square is not a question about what happened in the past; it is a question about what a community chooses to honour now. David Lowenthal argued that heritage and history make different demands on us: history aims at a true account and is answerable to evidence, whereas heritage celebrates a past that a group has chosen as its own. Much confusion arises from treating a monument as though it were a historical claim. It is not evidence about the past; it is a statement, made in the present, about who matters.

Judging the past is not always a mistake, but it is a demanding activity, and it is usually done badly. It requires a serious attempt to see what alternatives were visible at the time, and to distinguish actions that were widely questioned from those that almost no one could then have imagined avoiding.

It also requires precision about what is being judged: individuals for their choices, institutions for their effects, or an entire era, which is a vague and usually empty accusation. The charge of presentism has a real use, which is to remind us that people in the past were not failed versions of ourselves; it becomes an abuse when it is used to protect the powerful dead from any question at all.