Periodic Reporting for period 3 - TextDiveGlobal (Textuality and Diversity: A Literary History of Europe and its Global Connections, 1545-1659)
Reporting period: 2024-09-01 to 2026-02-28
Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project
TextDiveGlobal is an ERC-funded project led by Prof. Warren Boutcher and based at Queen Mary University of London. Its first objective is to draw on the expertise of about 100 scholars from many different countries, disciplines, and area studies to produce, for Oxford University Press, an open access literary history of Europe and its global connections in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It reflects a changing scholarly environment in which researchers trained in Literature, in History, in Languages, and in different national traditions and area studies, are all working in related and connected ways on premodern texts and textual communities from across Europe and the world. A text is defined, following the anthropologist Karin Barber, as any tissue of words that is marked out, with form and boundaries, as an object of attention, whether oral, performed, written, printed, inscribed, or marked (by a material artefact) in some other way. This includes literature (understood as fictional or imaginative works), along with many texts and artefacts not normally associated with that category.
We aim to innovate in terms of the ways and frameworks in which we study past texts and their material traces across a range of traditions and languages. This has already happened in the study of modern texts and literature, under the influence of post-colonialism, transnational approaches, and debates about ‘world literature’. Similar approaches have been introduced piecemeal in the study of medieval and early modern texts. But large-scale academic and collaborative projects in literary history are still normally based in the literary heritage of a particular western European nation-state or in the literary relations between two such nation-states, even when there is a turn to more global, diverse or deconstructed versions of these national traditions. This is especially true when it comes to texts and literature of the period 1500-1700.
TextDiveGlobal channels various kinds of historical study of texts into a larger field of interdisciplinary literary history. We are compiling a deep-dive history of the broad textual heritage of all of early modern Europe, in which microhistories of a wide array of texts come together as a literary macro-history. Europe in the premodern period is an internally connected, polycentric, macro-regional entity that is globally connected as never before—which requires us to include European texts, textual actors and languages circulating in other parts of the world, and vice-versa. What can such a history tell us, as people of many different backgrounds within and beyond Europe, about our premodern literary and textual heritage?
A manageable period—but one slightly longer than the period chosen before the project started—has been selected so that attention can be properly paid to a wide variety of languages, texts, forms, spaces, and actors, to production and circulation, to new works alongside translation and the ongoing transmission of older works. We are focussing on the 150 years between 1529 (the Ottomans’ first siege of Vienna, the Diet of Speyer, the Treaty of Zaragoza, the aftermath of the Sack of Rome) and 1683 (the Ottomans’ second and final siege of Vienna, Baron Lahontan’s landing at Québec, Louis XIV’s completed move to Versailles). This period sees the peak of ‘Ottoman Europe’ (Ottoman incursions into and occupation of large tracts of southeast Europe), the European religious wars following the Reformation, and the global confluence of multiple European powers and other regions and empires of the Americas, Asia, Africa.
The second objective is to find an integrated analytical framework for literary history on this kind of scale. This framework is ‘textuality and diversity’, understood as both a methodological principle and a historical theme. Textuality goes hand in hand with language and form, diversity with social and cultural mobility. The former is defined as the social process of textual formation (poiesis), communication (sermo), and transfer (translatio). We investigate different social participants in textuality (authors, translators, publishers, disseminators, speakers, singers, performers, readers, teachers, and so on) and different spaces of textual and linguistic community (including nations, diasporas, confessions, religious institutions, libraries, academies).
This overall focus determines the selection of textual corpora for analysis on the project, the angles from which they are investigated, the choice of scholars and scholarly fields. Each corpus is shaped in one way or another by multiple languages or dialects, scripts, registers. Language, though, is only one of many variants in textual production, alongside writing, script, form, material format, the social relations of textual actors, the spaces of textual production, and so on. And texts are in turn circulated and interpreted by a great variety of textual communities in different forms using different languages and multilingual combinations across the regions of Europe and its global connections in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
We are asking what attending to textuality and diversity in these senses tells us about the literary heritage of a vital period in Europe’s past, during which the Reformation divided Christendom, Catholic and Protestant evangelical missions spread across the continent and the world, new forms of social mobility driven by education and the dissemination of literacies met new forms of aristocratic retrenchment, women participated in large numbers in textual production and circulation amid a hardening patriarchal context, European colonies and the slave trade took root in the Americas and the Atlantic, and the Ottoman Empire took control of much of southeast Europe.
We aim to innovate in terms of the ways and frameworks in which we study past texts and their material traces across a range of traditions and languages. This has already happened in the study of modern texts and literature, under the influence of post-colonialism, transnational approaches, and debates about ‘world literature’. Similar approaches have been introduced piecemeal in the study of medieval and early modern texts. But large-scale academic and collaborative projects in literary history are still normally based in the literary heritage of a particular western European nation-state or in the literary relations between two such nation-states, even when there is a turn to more global, diverse or deconstructed versions of these national traditions. This is especially true when it comes to texts and literature of the period 1500-1700.
TextDiveGlobal channels various kinds of historical study of texts into a larger field of interdisciplinary literary history. We are compiling a deep-dive history of the broad textual heritage of all of early modern Europe, in which microhistories of a wide array of texts come together as a literary macro-history. Europe in the premodern period is an internally connected, polycentric, macro-regional entity that is globally connected as never before—which requires us to include European texts, textual actors and languages circulating in other parts of the world, and vice-versa. What can such a history tell us, as people of many different backgrounds within and beyond Europe, about our premodern literary and textual heritage?
A manageable period—but one slightly longer than the period chosen before the project started—has been selected so that attention can be properly paid to a wide variety of languages, texts, forms, spaces, and actors, to production and circulation, to new works alongside translation and the ongoing transmission of older works. We are focussing on the 150 years between 1529 (the Ottomans’ first siege of Vienna, the Diet of Speyer, the Treaty of Zaragoza, the aftermath of the Sack of Rome) and 1683 (the Ottomans’ second and final siege of Vienna, Baron Lahontan’s landing at Québec, Louis XIV’s completed move to Versailles). This period sees the peak of ‘Ottoman Europe’ (Ottoman incursions into and occupation of large tracts of southeast Europe), the European religious wars following the Reformation, and the global confluence of multiple European powers and other regions and empires of the Americas, Asia, Africa.
The second objective is to find an integrated analytical framework for literary history on this kind of scale. This framework is ‘textuality and diversity’, understood as both a methodological principle and a historical theme. Textuality goes hand in hand with language and form, diversity with social and cultural mobility. The former is defined as the social process of textual formation (poiesis), communication (sermo), and transfer (translatio). We investigate different social participants in textuality (authors, translators, publishers, disseminators, speakers, singers, performers, readers, teachers, and so on) and different spaces of textual and linguistic community (including nations, diasporas, confessions, religious institutions, libraries, academies).
This overall focus determines the selection of textual corpora for analysis on the project, the angles from which they are investigated, the choice of scholars and scholarly fields. Each corpus is shaped in one way or another by multiple languages or dialects, scripts, registers. Language, though, is only one of many variants in textual production, alongside writing, script, form, material format, the social relations of textual actors, the spaces of textual production, and so on. And texts are in turn circulated and interpreted by a great variety of textual communities in different forms using different languages and multilingual combinations across the regions of Europe and its global connections in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
We are asking what attending to textuality and diversity in these senses tells us about the literary heritage of a vital period in Europe’s past, during which the Reformation divided Christendom, Catholic and Protestant evangelical missions spread across the continent and the world, new forms of social mobility driven by education and the dissemination of literacies met new forms of aristocratic retrenchment, women participated in large numbers in textual production and circulation amid a hardening patriarchal context, European colonies and the slave trade took root in the Americas and the Atlantic, and the Ottoman Empire took control of much of southeast Europe.
Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far
We have assembled a core team of three Post-Doctoral Research Fellows, a Project Manager who holds a PhD in early modern literature, and a Digital Humanities Support Officer. This team has been involved in recruiting and liaising with an international body of—so far—about 85 contributing experts with a wide range of skills in different languages and area studies. Beyond this, a further 120 scholars have signed up to our network, in order to hear about and participate in our research events. We have run a series of international workshops hosted by the University of York (England), the Università degli Studi di Padova (Italy), the University of Southern Denmark (Odense/ Copenhagen), and the University of Rijeka (Croatia). We are grateful to all our hosts. We have also run a series of colloquia in London.
We are assembling our multilingual corpora of texts on four principles: ‘Works’, ‘Forms’, ‘Spaces’, ‘Events’. Our experts put together corpora on different scales, with different relationships to the overarching principle. During the first half of the project the focus has been on textual corpora of ‘Works’ and ‘Forms’, though research has also commenced on corpora of ‘Spaces’ and ‘Events’ (and in the second half, we will continue to do further work on ‘Works’ and ‘Forms’, while focussing on ‘Spaces’ and ‘Events’). By the end of February 2024, 33 participating experts had submitted information about their corpora, identified a textual sample from their corpus as the basis for their case-study, written a draft of the case-study and their larger study, and/ or presented on their materials at one of our workshops or colloquia.
Under ‘Works’ this has included research on: the ‘Song of Songs’ from the Bible; the French translation by Jacques Amyot of Plutarch’s ‘Lives’; the ‘Confessions’ of St. Augustine; the medieval romance of 'Paris and Vienne'; the neo-Latin drama ‘Acolastus’ (by Gnapheus); Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’; Bandello’s ‘Novels’; the world atlas of the Blaeu publishing house in the Netherlands; the Murúa manscripts of Inca ethnography and history, produced by a Spanish priest with Indigenous assistance in the Andes; works composed across Europe and/or the Ottoman Empire by the Italian Protestant diaspora, the English Catholic diaspora, the westward Armenian diaspora (Eremia K‘eōmurchean); epics by the Hungarian poet Zrínyi and the Croatian poet Gundulić.
Under ‘Forms’ it has included research on: Portuguese lyrics; Scandinavian neo-Latin epic; pastoral in Iberia and the Americas; Italian poetics; private love letters; Black female festive performance in the Americas; European popular news songs; puppet shows; forms of women's spiritual speech and writing; Christianised European-Asian genres; inscriptions on paintings; Latin missionary paratexts; Kongolese administrative forms; ethnographic codices (Asia, Americas).
Under ‘Spaces’ research has progressed on Christianised Arabic texts for the Arab East. Under ‘Events’ work has been done on the canons and decrees of the Council of Trent, on demonological texts in the territories of Ukraine, and martyrological narratives across multiple genres and cultures.
We are assembling our multilingual corpora of texts on four principles: ‘Works’, ‘Forms’, ‘Spaces’, ‘Events’. Our experts put together corpora on different scales, with different relationships to the overarching principle. During the first half of the project the focus has been on textual corpora of ‘Works’ and ‘Forms’, though research has also commenced on corpora of ‘Spaces’ and ‘Events’ (and in the second half, we will continue to do further work on ‘Works’ and ‘Forms’, while focussing on ‘Spaces’ and ‘Events’). By the end of February 2024, 33 participating experts had submitted information about their corpora, identified a textual sample from their corpus as the basis for their case-study, written a draft of the case-study and their larger study, and/ or presented on their materials at one of our workshops or colloquia.
Under ‘Works’ this has included research on: the ‘Song of Songs’ from the Bible; the French translation by Jacques Amyot of Plutarch’s ‘Lives’; the ‘Confessions’ of St. Augustine; the medieval romance of 'Paris and Vienne'; the neo-Latin drama ‘Acolastus’ (by Gnapheus); Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’; Bandello’s ‘Novels’; the world atlas of the Blaeu publishing house in the Netherlands; the Murúa manscripts of Inca ethnography and history, produced by a Spanish priest with Indigenous assistance in the Andes; works composed across Europe and/or the Ottoman Empire by the Italian Protestant diaspora, the English Catholic diaspora, the westward Armenian diaspora (Eremia K‘eōmurchean); epics by the Hungarian poet Zrínyi and the Croatian poet Gundulić.
Under ‘Forms’ it has included research on: Portuguese lyrics; Scandinavian neo-Latin epic; pastoral in Iberia and the Americas; Italian poetics; private love letters; Black female festive performance in the Americas; European popular news songs; puppet shows; forms of women's spiritual speech and writing; Christianised European-Asian genres; inscriptions on paintings; Latin missionary paratexts; Kongolese administrative forms; ethnographic codices (Asia, Americas).
Under ‘Spaces’ research has progressed on Christianised Arabic texts for the Arab East. Under ‘Events’ work has been done on the canons and decrees of the Council of Trent, on demonological texts in the territories of Ukraine, and martyrological narratives across multiple genres and cultures.
Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)
Our progress beyond the state of the art in the first half of the project, to the end of February 2024, consists, firstly, in the opening of a new, interdisciplinary field of inquiry into the literary history of Europe and its global connections in the early modern period, and in the achieved diversity, in our online and research forums, of groupings of textual materials and of scholars from multiple different disciplines and area studies.
Secondly, progress has been made on four interacting levels of analysis that we set ourselves. The first two levels involve analysis of particular textual samples and of the corpora from which they are selected. Here we are going beyond the state of the art by combining the kinds of textual objects and forms you might expect to find in a traditional literary history—secular, vernacular works of imaginative poetry, drama, prose—with others that you would normally find investigated in other fields.
We have, then, carried out research on Plutarch, Machiavelli, Bandello, and the medieval romance about Paris and Vienne. But we have also included biblical, patristic and other religious works, along with a neo-Latin drama, now largely unknown but famous in its time, and a world atlas full of text. And we have also investigated a whole range of works that were not canonical or widely circulated at the time in western Europe, or that were produced by groups of people (such as diasporas, convents), rather than by individual authors. Similarly, under ‘Forms’ we are looking at various literary genres and at genre criticism. But we are also studying forms of other kinds that involve but may not centre on text (e.g. puppet shows, news songs).
We are also making progress in seeing how our four principles intersect in the case of each and every corpus of texts: the third level of analysis. Texts in history have form and do work in and on specific spaces and events. They diversify in form and language as they move through different contexts in which they do different kinds of work. But we have found that they always do this within the context of complementary drives to preserve and canonise certain genres and texts as carriers and markers of lasting values and identities, to see them as enduring forms and works. So, for example, we have been working on a genre shaped in a particular way in western Europe, pastoral, which was then re-configured for the spaces and occasions of New Spain.
This already brings us to the final and fourth level of analysis, and the most challenging: how various dimensions of sociocultural diversity and mobility relate to dimensions of textual, generic, and linguistic diversity; what changes over time and space there are in such relations both within our period and across ours and other periods, and both within and beyond Europe. This is the area where we expect to have the most exciting results by the end of the project, in terms of taking the project beyond the state of the art.
At this mid-point, after 30 months, some indications can be given of the most useful concepts and ideas in development. One concept we are using is from International Relations literature: the notion of diversity regimes. In different times and places, varying axes of cultural difference become salient and particular expressions of difference or dissent are accommodated and legitimated by international governing authorities or other regimes, where others are not. The main example from our period is the provisions regarding acceptable religious confessions and their relationship to legitimate statehood that are put in place in the treaties of Westphalia.
We are extending this concept to the realm of communications and to other levels below that of international relations (right down to the level of an individual writer or reader, who may form their own diversity regime). A simple example is the way that, in our period, in the changed conditions brought about by print and the Reformation, what you can say and write about religion becomes as never before the focus of such regimes—from the conciliar regime established by the Council of Trent to the literary philosophy of diversity put in place by the French essayist Michel de Montaigne. In an environment of intensified religious controversy and moral customs controls, the differences between what are considered safe and unsafe forms of textuality mobility and diversity are pronounced, and vary by the gender and social status of those participating in textuality.
Within Europe, we are revealing an extraordinary variety of intersecting textual communities and nations who are in some sense forming or circulating their own bodies of literature and reading, speaking, performing, writing or rewriting them in shared ways. This includes the textual and literary forms of nationhood that much previous work has shown to be powerfully emergent in Iberia, France, England, the Dutch Republic in this period—even if the internal diversity of these forms is now much more apparent. But it also includes textual communities at other levels and in other spaces, both regional and transnational—from those of convents and academies, to those of diasporas and exiles.
We are also investigating a variety of global spaces and contexts in which European languages and forms hybridise or interact with non-European languages and forms, and in which non-European textual actors and cultures are instrumental in shaping the conditions for European textual production. We are utilising the framework provided by the scholar of Sanskrit literature, Sheldon Pollock, to think about the different ways in which classical and sacred languages (Latin, Arabic, old Church Slavonic, classical Chinese, Persian) provide a framework for the development of cosmopolitan vernacular languages that may eventually displace them, in the name of a ‘vernacular polity’ such as the France of Louis XIV’s maturity.
But instead of looking forward in Whiggish vein from the medieval and early modern period to the establishment of monolingual, nation-state-based literary and archival cultures in the nineteenth century, and asking how early developments prepared the way for them, we can look backwards and ask how the previous millennium was different. It was a millennium in which forms of oral and literate multilingualism were normal, in which they varied globally between different civilisational ecumenes, and within those ecumenes by region. How can we characterise the particular features of the literary and linguistic history of our period in this light?
Secondly, progress has been made on four interacting levels of analysis that we set ourselves. The first two levels involve analysis of particular textual samples and of the corpora from which they are selected. Here we are going beyond the state of the art by combining the kinds of textual objects and forms you might expect to find in a traditional literary history—secular, vernacular works of imaginative poetry, drama, prose—with others that you would normally find investigated in other fields.
We have, then, carried out research on Plutarch, Machiavelli, Bandello, and the medieval romance about Paris and Vienne. But we have also included biblical, patristic and other religious works, along with a neo-Latin drama, now largely unknown but famous in its time, and a world atlas full of text. And we have also investigated a whole range of works that were not canonical or widely circulated at the time in western Europe, or that were produced by groups of people (such as diasporas, convents), rather than by individual authors. Similarly, under ‘Forms’ we are looking at various literary genres and at genre criticism. But we are also studying forms of other kinds that involve but may not centre on text (e.g. puppet shows, news songs).
We are also making progress in seeing how our four principles intersect in the case of each and every corpus of texts: the third level of analysis. Texts in history have form and do work in and on specific spaces and events. They diversify in form and language as they move through different contexts in which they do different kinds of work. But we have found that they always do this within the context of complementary drives to preserve and canonise certain genres and texts as carriers and markers of lasting values and identities, to see them as enduring forms and works. So, for example, we have been working on a genre shaped in a particular way in western Europe, pastoral, which was then re-configured for the spaces and occasions of New Spain.
This already brings us to the final and fourth level of analysis, and the most challenging: how various dimensions of sociocultural diversity and mobility relate to dimensions of textual, generic, and linguistic diversity; what changes over time and space there are in such relations both within our period and across ours and other periods, and both within and beyond Europe. This is the area where we expect to have the most exciting results by the end of the project, in terms of taking the project beyond the state of the art.
At this mid-point, after 30 months, some indications can be given of the most useful concepts and ideas in development. One concept we are using is from International Relations literature: the notion of diversity regimes. In different times and places, varying axes of cultural difference become salient and particular expressions of difference or dissent are accommodated and legitimated by international governing authorities or other regimes, where others are not. The main example from our period is the provisions regarding acceptable religious confessions and their relationship to legitimate statehood that are put in place in the treaties of Westphalia.
We are extending this concept to the realm of communications and to other levels below that of international relations (right down to the level of an individual writer or reader, who may form their own diversity regime). A simple example is the way that, in our period, in the changed conditions brought about by print and the Reformation, what you can say and write about religion becomes as never before the focus of such regimes—from the conciliar regime established by the Council of Trent to the literary philosophy of diversity put in place by the French essayist Michel de Montaigne. In an environment of intensified religious controversy and moral customs controls, the differences between what are considered safe and unsafe forms of textuality mobility and diversity are pronounced, and vary by the gender and social status of those participating in textuality.
Within Europe, we are revealing an extraordinary variety of intersecting textual communities and nations who are in some sense forming or circulating their own bodies of literature and reading, speaking, performing, writing or rewriting them in shared ways. This includes the textual and literary forms of nationhood that much previous work has shown to be powerfully emergent in Iberia, France, England, the Dutch Republic in this period—even if the internal diversity of these forms is now much more apparent. But it also includes textual communities at other levels and in other spaces, both regional and transnational—from those of convents and academies, to those of diasporas and exiles.
We are also investigating a variety of global spaces and contexts in which European languages and forms hybridise or interact with non-European languages and forms, and in which non-European textual actors and cultures are instrumental in shaping the conditions for European textual production. We are utilising the framework provided by the scholar of Sanskrit literature, Sheldon Pollock, to think about the different ways in which classical and sacred languages (Latin, Arabic, old Church Slavonic, classical Chinese, Persian) provide a framework for the development of cosmopolitan vernacular languages that may eventually displace them, in the name of a ‘vernacular polity’ such as the France of Louis XIV’s maturity.
But instead of looking forward in Whiggish vein from the medieval and early modern period to the establishment of monolingual, nation-state-based literary and archival cultures in the nineteenth century, and asking how early developments prepared the way for them, we can look backwards and ask how the previous millennium was different. It was a millennium in which forms of oral and literate multilingualism were normal, in which they varied globally between different civilisational ecumenes, and within those ecumenes by region. How can we characterise the particular features of the literary and linguistic history of our period in this light?