Early Modern Exchanges: Dialogues Between Nations and Cultures, 1550-1750

262 Pages·2015·1.883 MB·English

by  Helen Hackett

EARLY MODERN EXCHANGES
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, the inscriptions beside her are Latin, and her creator was an
‘incomer’ artist. She is emblematic of the early modern culture of exchange, both between
England and its neighbours, and between Europe and the wider world. This volume presents
fresh research into such early modern exchanges, exploring how new identities, subjectivities
and artefacts were forged in dialogues and encounters between diverse cultures, nations and
language communities.
The early modern period was a time of creative interactions between cultures and disciplines,
and accordingly this is a multidisciplinary volume, drawing together international experts in
literature, history, modern and ancient languages and art history. It understands cultural
exchange as encompassing both the geographical mobilities of travel and trade and the
transmission of ideas across borders and between languages, as enabled by the new technology
of print. Sites of exchange were located not only in distant and unfamiliar lands, but also in the
bookseller’s shop and the scholar’s study. The volume also explores the productive and
complex dialogues between early modern culture and the classical past.
The types of exchanges discussed include the linguistic transactions of translation and
imitation; interactions between cultural elites, such as monarchs, courtiers and diplomats; and
the catalytic influences of particularly mobile or outward-looking individuals and groups.
Ranging from the neo-Latin poetry of an English author to the plays of a nun in seventeenth-
century New Spain, from royal portraits exchanged in diplomatic negotiations to travelling
companions in the Ottoman Empire, the volume sheds new light on the dynamic processes of
dialogue and exchange that formed early modern thought and culture.
Transculturalisms, 1400–1700
Series Editors:
Mihoko Suzuki, University of Miami, USA,
Ann Rosalind Jones, Smith College, USA, and
Jyotsna Singh, Michigan State University, USA
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 will investigate travelers, 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.
Also in this series:
The Chinese Impact upon English Renaissance Literature
A Globalization and Liberal Cosmopolitan Approach to Donne and Milton
Mingjun Lu
Commedia dell’ Arte and the Mediterranean
Charting Journeys and Mapping ‘Others’
Erith Jaffe-Berg
Early Modern Catholics, Royalists, and Cosmopolitans
English Transnationalism and the Christian Commonwealth
Brian C. Lockey
English Colonial Texts on Tangier, 1661–1684
Imperialism and the Politics of Resistance
Karim Bejjit
Early Modern Exchanges
Dialogues Between Nations and Cultures, 1550–1750
Edited by
HELEN HACKETT
University College London, UK
First published 2015 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright © Helen Hackett and the contributors 2015
Helen Hackett has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be
identified as the editor of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Library of Congress data has been applied for.
ISBN: 978-1-4724-2529-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-3155-7846-0 (ebk-PDF)
ISBN: 978-1-3171-4694-0 (ebk-ePUB)
Contents
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Helen Hackett
PART I LINGUISTIC EXCHANGES: TRANSLATION AND IMITATION
1 Translation as a Currency of Cultural Exchange in Early Modern England
Brenda M. Hosington
2 Translation and Language Learning: The English Version of Petrarch’s Triumph of Eternity
Attributed to Elizabeth I
Alessandra Petrina
3 A Triangular Relationship: Classical Latin Literature in Thomas Campion’s Neo-Latin and
English Short Poetry
Gesine Manuwald
PART II INTERNATIONAL DIALOGUES BETWEEN CULTURAL ELITES
4 A King and Two Queens: The holograph correspondence of Philip II with Mary I and
Elizabeth I
Rayne Allinson and Geoffrey Parker
5 Negotiating the Royal Image: Portrait Exchanges in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Diplomacy
Tracey A. Sowerby
6 English ‘Public’ Politics and the French Example, 1620–1640
Noah Millstone
PART III COMMUNITIES OF EXCHANGE, AGENTS OF EXCHANGE
7 The Impact of Sir Thomas Smith
Andrew Hadfield
8 Writing the Travel Companion in Seventeenth-Century English Texts about the Ottoman
Empire
Eva Johanna Holmberg
9 Sor Juana’s Los empeños de una casa [The Trials of a Noble House]: Theatrical Exchange
between Europe and New Spain
Eavan O’Brien
10 The English Convents in Exile and Their Neighbours: Extended Networks, Patrons and
Benefactors
Caroline Bowden
Epilogue Exchanges: Time to Face the Strange?
Alexander Samson
Index
List of Figures
I.1 Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, Portrait of an Unknown Woman (also known as The
Persian Lady) (c.1590–1600), RCIN 406024, Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty
Queen Elizabeth II 2015
4.1 Letter of Queen Mary Tudor to her husband Philip, late July 1557, draft. British Library,
Cotton MS Titus B ii f. 109r. © The British Library Board
5.1 The Lyte Jewel, open to reveal Hilliard portrait of James I. © Trustees of the British
Museum. All rights reserved
5.2 The Lyte Jewel, with cover closed. The monogram ‘IR’ (with the I superimposed on the R)
is for ‘Iacobus Rex’. © Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved
5.3 Portrait miniature of Elizabeth I by Nicholas Hilliard. © Victoria and Albert Museum,
London
Notes on Contributors
Rayne Allinson is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. She
is the author of A Monarchy of Letters: Royal Correspondence and English Diplomacy in the
Reign of Elizabeth I (2012).
Caroline Bowden is Research Fellow of the AHRC funded Who Were the Nuns? project at
Queen Mary University of London (www.history.qmul.ac.uk/wwtn). The project created a fully
searchable database of the members of the English convents and two publications: English
Convents in Exile 1600–1800, a collection of six volumes of sources published 2012–13, and
a collection of essays co-edited with James Kelly, The English Convents in Exile, 1600–
1800: Communities, Culture and Identity (2013).
Helen Hackett is Professor of English at University College London, where she co-founded
the UCL Centre for Early Modern Exchanges in 2010. She is the author of five books, including
A Short History of English Renaissance Drama (2013), Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The
Meeting of Two Myths (2009), Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance
(2000), and Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary
(1995). She has recently published several essays on the international connections of
seventeenth-century English Catholics, especially the Aston-Thimelby circle. The most recent
is: ‘Unlocking the Mysteries of Constance Aston Fowler’s Verse Miscellany (Huntington
Library MS HM 904): the Hand B Scribe Identified’, in Joshua Eckhardt and Daniel Starza
Smith (eds), Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England (2014).
Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex and visiting Professor at
the University of Granada. He is the author of a number of works on early modern literature,
including Edmund Spenser: A Life (2012); Shakespeare and Republicanism (2005,
paperback, 2008); Literature, Travel and Colonialism in the English Renaissance, 1540–
1625 (1998, paperback, 2007); Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruyt and Salvage Soyl
(1997); and Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (1994).
Eva Johanna Holmberg is currently a university researcher and fellow at the Helsinki
Collegium for Advanced Studies. She specialises in the cultural history of travel and
encounters and exchanges between Christians, Muslim and Jews in the early modern period.
Her first book, Jews in the Early Modern English Imagination: A Scattered Nation came out
in 2012.
Brenda M. Hosington is a Professeur associé at the Université de Montréal, where she taught
translation theory and history, and English linguistics, and an Associate Research Fellow at the
University of Warwick in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance. She has published
widely on medieval and Renaissance translation and in the field of neo-Latin studies, is the
editor-in-chief of Renaissance Cultural Crossroads: An Online Catalogue of Translations in
Britain 1473–1640, and is at present conducting, with Marie-Alice Belle at the Université de
Montréal, a funded research project entitled ‘Translation and Print in Early Modern Britain,
1473–1660’.
Gesine Manuwald is Professor of Latin at University College London. Her research interests
include Roman drama, Roman epic and Roman rhetoric, especially Cicero’s speeches, as well
as the reception of the ancient world, particularly in early modern literature and opera. She has
published a number of articles on various neo-Latin poets and has recently co-edited a volume
on Neo-Latin Poetry in the British Isles (2012), which includes some essays first delivered as
talks at the launch conference of the UCL Centre for Early Modern Exchanges.
Noah Millstone is lecturer in history at the University of Bristol. He received a Ph.D. from
Stanford University in 2011 and has held research fellowships at the Institute of Historical
Research and Harvard University. His work has appeared in the Journal of British Studies,
Past and Present and elsewhere, and he is presently completing a monograph on manuscript
circulation and political practice in early Stuart England.
Eavan O’Brien is Research Associate of the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies,
and Adjunct Lecturer, at Trinity College Dublin. She has a particular interest in women’s
writing during the early modern period, and is Coordinator of the Forum for the Study of Early
Modern Women in Continental Europe. Her monograph, Women in the Prose of María de
Zayas, was published in 2010. She edited a collection of essays, Representing Women’s
Authority in the Early Modern World, which was published in 2013.
Geoffrey Parker is Distinguished University Professor and Andreas Dorpalen Professor of
European History at The Ohio State University. He has written several articles and books that
deal with the relations between Philip II and England, culminating in Imprudent King. A New
Biography of Philip II (2014). He is also the author of Global Crisis: War, Climate Change
and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (2013), which won a British Academy Medal for
a ‘landmark academic achievement’ in 2014.
Alessandra Petrina is Associate Professor of English Literature at the Università degli Studi
di Padova, Italy. She has written The Kingis Quair (1997), Cultural Politics in Fifteenth-
century England. The Case of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (2004) and Machiavelli in the
British Isles. Two Early Modern Translations of the Prince (2009). She has also published
on late-medieval and Renaissance literature and intellectual history, recently editing The
Medieval Translator – Traduire au Moyen Age 15. In principio fuit interpres (2013);
Machiavellian Encounters in Tudor and Stuart England (2013); Natio Scota (2012);
Between Italy and the British Isles. Dialogue and Confrontation from the Dawn of
Vernacular Literatures to the Seventeenth Century (2011); and Representations of Elizabeth