ABSTRACT
This edited collection examines the meeting points between travel, mobility, and conflict to uncover the experience of travel – whether real or imagined – in the early modern world. Until relatively recently, both domestic travel and voyages to the wider world remained dangerous undertakings. Physical travel, whether initiated by religious conversion and pilgrimage, diplomacy, trade, war, or the desire to encounter other cultures, inevitably heralded disruption: contact zones witnessed cultural encounters that were not always cordial, despite the knowledge acquisition and financial gain that could be reaped from travel. Vast compendia of travel such as Hakluyt’s Principla Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries, printed from the late sixteenth century, and Prévost's Histoire Générale des Voyages (1746-1759) underscored European exploration as a marker of European progress, and in so doing showed the tensions that can arise as a consequence of interaction with other cultures. In focusing upon language acquisition and translation, travel and religion, travel and politics, and imaginary travel, the essays in this collection tease out the ways in which travel was both obstructed and enriched by conflict.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|60 pages
Language, translation, and assimilation
chapter 2|19 pages
Language, mediation, conflict and power in early modern China
chapter 3|21 pages
“Strange accidents”
part II|66 pages
Travel, religion, and the violence of the road
chapter 4|27 pages
Arming the Alps through art
chapter 5|19 pages
Between hermits and heretics
chapter 6|18 pages
Avoiding conflict in the early modern Levant
part III|58 pages
War, diplomacy, and dissimulation
chapter 9|14 pages
The wars in Europe and the journeying play
part IV|68 pages
The art of travel and imaginary journeys