Connected Mobilities in the Early Modern World

The Practice and Experience of Movement

9789463729239

280 pages

Amsterdam University Press

Hardback $140.00

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Overview

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.

Author Bio

Paul Nelles is Associate Professor of early modern history at Carleton University. His research focuses on the history of books, writing, and religion in early modern Europe. His study of Jesuit communication, The Information Order: Writing, Mobility and Distance in the Making of the Society of Jesus (1540–1573), is forthcoming. Rosa Salzberg is Associate Professor of Early Modern History, University of Trento. Her research focuses on communication, urban history and the history of migration and mobility in early modern Europe, with a focus on Venice. She is the author of Ephemeral City: Cheap Print and Urban Culture in Renaissance Venice (2014).