The Mobility of People and Things in the Early Modern Mediterranean

For centuries artists, diplomats, and merchants served as cultural intermediaries in the Mediterranean. Stationed in port cities and other entrepôts of the Mediterranean, these go-betweens forged intercultural connections even as they negotiated and sometimes promoted cultural misunderstandings. They also moved objects of all kinds across time and space. This volume considers how the mobility of art and material culture is intertwined with greater Mediterranean networks from 1580 to 1880. Contributors see the movement of people and objects as transformational, emphasizing the trajectory of objects over single points of origin, multiplicity over unity, and mutability over stasis.

Elisabeth A. Fraser is Professor of Art History at the University of South Florida, Tampa, USA.

Introduction: The Mobility of People and Things in the Early Modern Mediterranean: The Art of Travel - Elisabeth A. Fraser; 1 "From Scorching Spain and Freezing Muscovy": English Embroidery and Early Modern Mediterranean Trade - Sylvia Houghteling; 2 A Tale of Two Guns: Maritime Weaponry between France and Algiers - Meredith Martin and Gillian Weiss; 3 Furnishing the Taste for Coffee in Early Modern France - Julia Landweber; 4 Substitutes and Souvenirs: Reliving Polish Victory in "Turkish" Tents - Ashley Dimmig; 5 The Ottoman Costume Album as Mobile Object and Agent of Contact - Elisabeth Fraser; 6 Entangled Styles: Mediterranean Migration and Dress in Pre-Modern Algiers - Leyla Belkaïd-Neri; 7 The Art of Wandering: Alexander Svoboda and Photography in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean - Michèle Hannoosh