As the pages of recent issues of Renaissance Quarterly show only too clearly, the global or transnational turn in Renaissance studies is now in full swing. The field has, of course, always been transnational. The nation of origin was Italy. It transferred its discovery of the various aspects of modernity across to the other Western European nations. Those nations then expanded into the rest of the globe. Now, in the postcolonial age, we are turning to the exploration of different models of transfer between the various regions and peoples of Europe and between Europe and the rest of the globe.
University College London's Centre for Early Modern Exchanges (EME) was founded in 2010—a more propitious moment for the study of exchange and dialogue than the current one—to pursue such explorations. This volume, edited by one of the co-founders, Helen Hackett, with an epilogue by the other, Alexander Samson, offers the fruits of some of the early work associated with EME, by scholars from many different disciplines. It appears in the series Transculturalisms, which has been publishing important and influential volumes in the field since 2008, with Ashgate, Routledge, and now Palgrave Macmillan.
Hackett's excellent introduction implies that England and the English language will prove to be the common denominator in the eponymous exchanges. There is only one chapter where they do not (Eavan O'Brien's). The volume is divided into three parts, treating linguistic exchanges, international dialogues, and communities and agents of exchange. But one of its chief strengths is its sustained attention across the parts to women's agency. Following Brenda Hosington's remarks on women translators in the first chapter, Alessandra Petrina makes a strong case for attributing greater philosophical coherence to Elizabeth I's translative choices. O'Brien shows how Sor Juana took one of Calderón's plays and turned it into something rich and strange in a Mexican setting. Rayne Allinson and Geoffrey Parker retrieve the epistolary agency of two English queens, Mary I and Elizabeth I, in resisting the political and dynastic plans of Philip II. Caroline Bowden's fascinating chapter shows how the nuns in English convents from the 1590s managed to balance the need to maintain their reputation for following the rule, which meant being seen to be properly enclosed, with the need to be open to exchanges with their neighbors and potential benefactors.
The rest of the chapters are a mixture of valuable case studies and excellent overviews. Gesine Manuwald offers a compelling example of Thomas Campion's triangulation of classical Latin sources and forms with Neo-Latin and English compositions. Andrew Hadfield, in biographical mode, recovers the legacy of Sir Thomas Smith as a non-Italianate Renaissance man. Eva Johanna Holmberg explores what two travelers to the Levant, Fynes Moryson and John Sanderson, have to say about their companions on their journeys. The unprejudiced admiration expressed by Sanderson for his Jewish companions will warm the heart of any scholar weary of finding the roots of contemporary prejudices in early modern texts. Tracey Sowerby provides a brilliant overview of the roles played by portraiture in Elizabethan and early Stuart diplomacy. Portraits offered both a means of communicating nonverbally and of nuancing the verbal communications that were made.
Noah Millstone demonstrates how comparative analysis can challenge some of the conclusions of more insular studies of Tudor and Stuart politics. The pre–Civil War Stuart regime looks less like a state geared to production of public political propaganda, and more able to control the London-centered press, if we compare it, as Stuart-era analysts themselves did, with the Bourbon regime post-1610 and other European states. But for this reviewer, the volume's first chapter is worth the recommended retail price on its own. Hosington provides a magisterial overview of over a decade's work cataloging and studying all translations out of and into all languages printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland. She divides her beautifully structured and expressed analysis into sections on metaphors for translation, translators as go-betweens, and translation as knowledge transfer.
Despite the best efforts of the introduction and the epilogue, the volume does not produce a coherent thesis about exchange as a way of reconceptualizing the culture of the period, as only a few of the chapters squarely address the issue. But it does offer a very valuable collection of studies for all scholars interested in transnational approaches to the early modern period.
