Connected Mobilities in the Early Modern World: The Practice and Experience of Movement (Connected Histories in the Early Modern World)

This book offers a panorama of movement, mobility, and exchange in the early modern world. While the pre-modern centuries have long been portrayed as static and self-contained, it is now acknowledged that Europe from the Middle Ages onwards saw increasing flows of people and goods. Movement also connected the continent more closely to other parts of the world. The present work challenges dominant notions of the ‘fixed,’ immobile nature of pre-modern cultures through study of the inter-connected material, social, and cultural dimensions of mobility. The case studies presented here chart the technologies and practices that both facilitated and impeded movement in diverse spheres of social activity such as communication, transport, politics, religion, medicine, and architecture. The chapters underscore the importance of the movement of people and objects through space and across distance to the dynamic economic, political, and cultural life of the early modern period. Table of Contents 5 Movement and Mobility in the Early Modern World : An Introduction 7 Moving Bodies 41 1. Linguistic Encounter : Fynes Moryson and the Uses of Language 41 2. Wading Through the Mire : Mobility on the Grand Tour (1585–1750) 63 3. Travelling for Health : Medicine and Rural Mobility in Early Modern Spain 87 Crossing Borders 113 4. Mobility and Danger on the Borders of the Papal States (Sixteenth-Seventeenth Centuries) 113 5. News on the Road : The Mobility of Handwritten Newsletters in Early Modern Europe 133 6. Quarantine, Mobility, and Trade : Commercial Lazzarettos in the Early Modern Adriatic 157 Global Networks 185 7. Devotion in Transit : Agnus Dei, Jesuit Missionaries, and Global Salvation in the Sixteenth Century 185 8. Getting to the Holy Land : Franciscan Journeys and Mediterranean Mobility 215 9. From Mount Lebanon to the Little Mount in Madras : Mobility and Catholic-Armenian Alms-Collecting Networks During the Eighteenth Century 237 Index 277