ABSTRACT
Writing histories-stories about how the world came to look and be a certain way-was among the most compelling preoccupations of the early modern period. The impulse to narrate was likely prompted, among other forces, by the expansion of local boundaries, violent changes in political structure and leadership, encounters with different geographies and cultures made possible by trade and travel, and the power dynamics between the church and state. The shifting sands of geography, political structure, and natural knowledge invited explanation, and authors from linguists to mapmakers volunteered. The resulting texts, translations, museums, objects, and performances provide an exceptional opportunity to consider the relationship between history and fiction in the early modern period. They invite us to investigate the role history played in the early modern imagination and to query the ways in which those imaginings shaped early modern culture. The essays in this collection interrogate the ways in which these imagined histories make use of the complicated relationship between known truths and new knowledge, facts and fictions, to react to and shape the context in which they were written. They do so from a variety of modern disciplinary approaches that would have had no meaning in the early modern world they strive to comprehend. One of the greatest challenges of early modern scholarship is resisting the urge to take our tools and shape the world we are studying to suit them. Instead, we must stretch our modern expectations to accommodate a foreign landscape that, while bearing some startling resemblances to our own, requires a more flexible and elegant mind. While we trained and practice as modern academics in specific disciplines, and we inherently depend upon the tools we developed during our careers, we are at our best in this volume when we shed those identities in favor of attempting to understand our sources as the products of early modern imaginations, steeped in fictions and shaped by histories. The project every author in this collection shares is very simple: in studying the early modern imagination, we must abandon our own imaginations and try to develop early modern ones.
