This series presents studies of the early modern contacts and exchanges among the states, polities and entrepreneurial organizations of Europe; Asia, including the Levant and East India/Indies; Africa; and the Americas. Books investigate travellers, merchants and cultural inventors, including explorers, mapmakers, artists and writers, as they operated in political, mercantile, sexual and linguistic economies. We encourage authors to reflect on their own methodologies in relation to issues and theories relevant to the study of transculturism/translation and transnationalism. We are particularly interested in work on and from the perspective of the Asians, Africans, and Americans involved in these interactions, and on such topics as:
-Material exchanges, including textiles, paper and printing, and technologies of knowledge
-Movements of bodies: embassies, voyagers, piracy, enslavement
-Travel writing: its purposes, practices, forms and effects on writing in other genres
-Belief systems: religions, philosophies, sciences
-Translations: verbal, artistic, philosophical
-Forms of transnational violence and its representations.
By Matteo Salvadore
July 01, 2016
From the 14th century onward, political and religious motives led Ethiopian travelers to Mediterranean Europe. For two centuries, their ancient Christian heritage and the myth of a fabled eastern king named Prester John allowed the Ethiopians to engage the continent's secular and religious elites ...
By Pascale Barthe
June 02, 2016
Focusing on early Renaissance Franco-Ottoman relations, this book fills a gap in studies of Ottoman representations by early modern European powers by addressing the Franco-Ottoman bond. In French Encounters with the Ottomans, Pascale Barthe examines the birth of the Franco-Ottoman rapprochement ...
By Eva Johanna Holmberg
January 28, 2012
Based on travel writings, religious history and popular literature, Jews in the Early Modern English Imagination explores the encounter between English travellers and the Jews. While literary and religious traditions created an image of Jews as untrustworthy, even sinister, travellers came to know ...
Edited
By John Watkins, Kathryn L. Reyerson
June 28, 2014
The first full length volume to approach the premodern Mediterranean from a fully interdisciplinary perspective, this collection defines the Mediterranean as a coherent region with distinct patterns of social, political, and cultural exchange. The essays explore the production, modification, and ...
Edited
By Jason Powell, William T. Rossiter
April 08, 2016
A detailed examination of the relationship between the discourses and practices of authority and diplomacy in the late medieval and early modern periods, Authority and Diplomacy from Dante to Shakespeare interrogates the persistent duality of the roles of author and ambassador. The volume ...
By Helen Hackett
January 13, 2016
Marcus Gheeraerts’s portrait of a ’Persian lady’ - probably in fact an English lady in masquing costume - exemplifies the hybridity of early modern English culture. Her surrounding landscape and the embroidery on her gown are typically English; but her head-dress and slippers are decidedly exotic, ...
Edited
By Christina H. Lee
February 17, 2016
Bringing to bear the latest developments across various areas of research and disciplines, this collection provides a broad perspective on how Western Europe made sense of a complex, multi-faceted, and by and large Sino-centered East and Southeast Asia. The volume covers the transpacific period--...
By Karim Bejjit
July 10, 2015
Recent years have seen growing academic interest in England’s colonial venture in Tangier in the late seventeenth century, and the crucial role it played not only in influencing contemporary domestic politics in England, but also in shaping new imperial policies in the Mediterranean. This critical ...
By Stephen Ortega
October 22, 2014
Negotiating Transcultural Relations in the Early Modern Mediterranean is a study of transcultural relations between Ottoman Muslims, Christian subjects of the Venetian Republic, and other social groups in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Focusing principally on Ottoman Muslims who came to ...
By Pinar Emiralioglu
March 27, 2014
Exploring the reasons for a flurry of geographical works in the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century, this study analyzes how cartographers, travellers, astrologers, historians and naval captains promoted their vision of the world and the centrality of the Ottoman Empire in it. It proposes a new...
Edited
By Sabine Schülting, Sabine Lucia Müller, Ralf Hertel
July 13, 2012
An exploration of early modern encounters between Christian Europe and the (Islamic) East from the perspective of performance studies and performativity theories, this collection focuses on the ways in which these cultural contacts were acted out on the real and metaphorical stages of theatre, ...
By Emily Byrne Curtis
January 28, 2009
In this study, Emily Byrne Curtis explores as her subject lenses, spectacles, aventurine glass, and windows found in China from the sixteenth century. She traces their technological development back to the glassworks in Murano, Venice, and explores their significance in terms of Venice's commerce ...