Histories in Motion
Travelling Matters across the Mediterranean
Rereading, Reshaping, Reusing Objects (10th–20th centuries)
In the last two decades objects have become increasingly relevant to historical studies as the primary focus of research discussing cross-cultural relations. Objects are produced used modified preserved and destroyed according to historically specific political and cultural settings thus providing researchers with information and insights about their original background. However they can also throw light on a large array of cross-cultural encounters when their mobility is put to the fore. Objects can move by being bought gifted bartered and sold borrowed or stolen collected and dispersed just as they can be modified repaired reshaped repurposed and destroyed in the process.
The Mediterranean as a barrier and as a meeting place for different polities and communities and as the setting of conflicted experiences of cultural political economic and social transformation easily lends itself to this kind of historical analysis. Featuring articles on Byzantine imperial silks and bronze doors from southern Italy eastern luxuries in Istanbul and African bolsas from the Canary Islands Arabic geographies and Hebrew religious texts travelling from shore to shore and from manuscript to the press and the ‘dead’ bodies of holy women and men this volume intends to tackle objects as sources and subjects of the history of cross-cultural encounters in innovative ways: focusing on the ‘second-handedness’ of displaced objects across the Mediterranean the volume intersects different chronologies — from antiquity to the present-day — and varying scales from the individual objects to the much larger one of the histories of their reinterpretation and repurposing.
Futuristic Fiction, Utopia, and Satire in the Age of the Enlightenment
Samuel Madden’s Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (1733)
Published anonymously in 1733 Memoirs of the Twentieth Century is one of the earliest futuristic novels known in Anglophone and Euro-American literature. It foregrounds an acceleration of history brought about by an increasing degree of global interconnectedness and the exclusion of prophetism and astrology as credible ways to know the future. The work of Samuel Madden an Irish writer and philanthropist of Whig sympathies it consists of a collection of diplomatic letters composed in the 1990s which the narrator claims were brought to him from the time to come by a supernatural entity. Through these correspondences twentieth-century world scenarios are spread out before the reader in which British naval power rules the waves and international commerce while the transnational scheming of the Jesuits threatens the independence of weaker European courts.
This book — which includes a study followed by an annotated edition of the text — assesses the cultural significance of this literary work as an apt observatory on how historical time as a cultural construction was shaped during the eighteenth century by new forms of transnational circulation of information and by the dubious space carved out in European culture by seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century debates on the nature of historical knowledge.
Through and by means of the Memoirs case study this volume aims to contribute to a wider cultural history of the future and speculative fiction. The novel’s ironic distancing of beliefs considered to be superstitious and absurd — such as divination techniques and occult and magical disciplines — offers an exceptional testimony to the negotiation of the boundaries of verisimilitude and credibility within a religious enlightenment.