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Acknowledgements
This volume originates from an international research network, ‘Textual Ambassadors: Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World’ that was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant no. AH/K001930/1). None of this would have been possible without its support. The essays presented here were written predominantly, but not exclusively, by members of the network. Other members have contributed essays to different publications arising from the project but have contributed to the content of this volume through our discussions over the years. We are grateful to all of them for their insights. Our especial thanks go to Joad Raymond and John Watkins who have selflessly shared their experience and wisdom as members of our steering committee. We are also grateful to Keble College, Oxford; The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities; and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge for their support of the network’s events. The inclusion of images in Chapter 13 was made possible by a grant from the Scouloudi Foundation in association with the Institute of Historical Research. The contributors would like to thank the staff at all of the libraries and archives listed in our Bibliography for their assistance over the years.
List of Figures
List of Abbreviations
Notes on Contributors xiii
Introduction: Literary and Diplomatic Cultures in the Early Modern World 1
Tracey A. Sowerby and Joanna Craigwood
I. LITERAR Y ENGAGEMENTS
1. The Place of the Literary in European Diplomacy: Origin Myths in Ambassadorial Handbooks 25 Joanna Craigwood
2. Distinguished Visitors: Literary Genre and Diplomatic Space in Shakespeare, Calderón, and Proust 41 Timothy Hampton
3. Lines of Amity: The Law of Nations in the Americas 54 Mark Netzloff
4. Diplomatic Pathos: Sidney’s Brazen Fictions and the Troubled Origins of International Law 69 John Watkins
II. TRANSLATION
5. Translation and Communication: War and Peace by Other Means 87 José María Pérez Fernández
6. The Politics of Translation: The Lusiads and European Diplomacy (1580–1664) 101 Catarina Fouto
7. Translation and Cultural Convergence in Late Sixteenth-century Scotland and Huguenot France 115 Peter Auger
III. DISSEMINATION
8. Books as Diplomatic Agents: Milton in Sweden 131 Joad Raymond
9. Diplomatic Knowledge on Display: Foreign Affairs in the Early Modern English Public Sphere 146 András Kiséry
10. A Diplomatic Narrative in the Archive: The War of Cyprus, Record Keeping Practices, and Historical Research in the Early Modern Venetian Chancery 160 Fabio Antonini
IV. DIPL OMATIC DOCUMENTS
11. Textual Ambassadors and Ambassadorial Texts: Literary Representation and Diplomatic Practice in George Turberville’s and Thomas Randolph’s Accounts of Russia (1568–9) 175 Jan Hennings
12. Diplomatic Writing as Aristocratic Self-Fashioning: French Ambassadors in Constantinople 190 Christine Vogel
13. Negotiating with the Material Text: Royal Correspondence between England and the Wider World 203 Tracey A. Sowerby
14. Ritual Practice and Textual Representations: Free Imperial Cities in the Society of Princes 220 André J. Krischer
List of Figures
13.1 James VI/I to Sultan Ahmed I, 17 January 1617
13.2 Elizabeth I to the Emperor of Cathay, 4 May 1602
13.3 James VI/I to the Emperor of Japan, 11 April 1614
14.1 Map with places mentioned in Chapter 14
14.2 Title leaf of one of the Cologne books of ceremonies (1740–97)
14.3 Letter of Duke Augustus to the council of Braunschweig, 1627
14.4 Title page of a so-called ‘Aufwartungsbuch’ (‘book of courtesies’) of Schwäbisch Hall
14.5 Cologne book of ceremonies (1740–97), fos. 88v–89r
14.6 Bremen by Matthaeus Merian, c.1641
BL British Library
List of Abbreviations
CSPF Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth, ed. Joseph Stevenson, Arthur J. Butler and Sophia C. Lomas, 23 vols (London, 1863–1950)
EHR English Historical Review
HJ The Historical Journal
JEMH Journal of Early Modern History
JMEMS Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
JMH Journal of Modern History
LP Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. John Sherren Brewer, James Gairdner, and Robert Henry Brodie, 23 vols (London, 1862–1932)
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004; online edn, October 2008)
P&P Past & Present
RBK Lloyd E. Berry and Robert O. Crummey (eds), Rude and Barbarous Kingdom: Russia in the Accounts of Sixteenth-century English Voyagers (Madison, 1968)
RR Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme
StP Studies in Philology
TNA The National Archives
ZHF Zeitschrift für historische Forschung
Notes on Contributors
Fabio Antonini completed his doctoral research as a member of the ERC-funded research group ‘ARCHIves—A Comparative History of Archives in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy’ at Birkbeck College, University of London. His research concerns the relationship between archival practice and the writing of history in early modern Venice, the development of the archive as a locus for historical research, and the role of information networks in the formation and defence of civic historical identities.
Peter Auger is Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at the University of Birmingham, having previously held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Queen Mary University of London. His various shorter pieces on Du Bartas’ reception history support the arguments made in Du Bartas’ Legacy in England and Scotland, which is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. His current research is on Franco-British poetic relations during James VI and I’s reign and multilingual literary practices.
Joanna Craigwood (University of Cambridge) works on the relationship between English literature and diplomacy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She has published variously on the diplomatic contexts for literary theory, Sidney, and Shakespeare, and on diplomats as book collectors. She was co-investigator on the AHRC-funded international network ‘Textual Ambassadors: Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World’ and has given invited talks on literature and diplomacy in Europe and the US.
Catarina Fouto is Lecturer in Portuguese Studies at King’s College London. She has published on Portuguese vernacular and Neo-Latin literature and the culture of the early modern period. Her interests include the history of the book and censorship, the history of literary theory, translation studies, and the reception of classical and medieval literature in the early-modern period. Catarina is a member of the international research group Seminario de Poética Europea del Renacimiento (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), a member of the editorial board of the journal Portuguese Studies and serves on the Committee of the Centre for Early Modern Studies (CEMS) at King’s College London.
Timothy Hampton is Professor of Comparative Literature and French at the University of California at Berkeley, where he also directs the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities. He is the author of Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, 2010). His other books include Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France (Ithaca, 2001) and Writing from History: the Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, 1990).
Jan Hennings is Associate Professor of History at Central European University, Budapest. His research has focused on early modern diplomacy, especially in Russian-European contexts. His current work explores Russian-Ottoman exchanges, concentrating on the establishment of the first Russian resident embassy in Constantinople at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Before moving to Budapest, he had held a Junior Research Fellowship at St John’s College Oxford, and taught history as a Visiting Professor and Gerda Henkel Fellow at Sabancı University, Istanbul. His publications include Russia and Courtly Europe: Ritual and the Culture of Diplomacy, 1648–1725 (Cambridge, 2016), and he is a co-editor (with Tracey A. Sowerby) of Practices of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World c.1410–1800 (London, 2017).
András Kiséry is Associate Professor of English at The City College of New York (CUNY). He has written about early modern English literature, political culture, and the material text, as well as about early twentieth-century German and Hungarian scholarship on the history of communication. He is author of Hamlet’s Moment: Drama and Political Knowledge in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2016) and co-editor of Formal Matters: Reading the Materials of English Renaissance Literature (Manchester, 2013), and Worlds of Hungarian Writing: National Literature as Intercultural Exchange (Madison, 2016). He is now working on two longer projects, about early modern English literature and the European book trade, and about the birth of media studies in early twentieth-century century sociology, history, and philology.
André J. Krischer studied history, philosophy and English literature in Cologne and Bonn. André is a Lecturer in British history at the University of Muenster, Germany, where he is also a Principal Investigator in the DFG-Collaborativ Research Centre ‘Cultures of Decision Making’ (SFB 1150). He is interested in the cultural history of diplomacy and foreign relations in the early modern world, the visual history of religious violence, the history of bureaucratic and parliamentary procedures of decision making, and the history of political crime. He has recently published a book on treason and treason trials in England from the sixteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century.
Mark Netzloff is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is the author of England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern English Colonialism (New York, 2003), the editor of John Norden’s The Surveyor’s Dialogue: A Critical Edition (Farnham, 2010), and the co-editor of Early Modern Drama in Performance: Essays in Honor of Lois Potter (2017). He recently completed a book, Writing Beyond the State: English Travelers, Soldiers, and Diplomats in Early Modern Europe, which is forthcoming with OUP.
José María Pérez Fernández teaches at the University of Granada. He works on the relations between translation, diplomacy, and the book trade, their role in the construction of the international republic of letters, and the early modern idea of Europe. He is particularly interested in general processes of communication and how financial and mercantile activity mirrored the ways in which these exchanges took place. During a recent tenure as Berenson Fellow (2017) at Villa I Tatti he worked on a monograph (with Edward Wilson-Lee), on Hernando Colón’s library (forthcoming with Yale UP in 2019). He is currently working on a new book titled Communication, Community, and Commerce
Joad Raymond was born and schooled in Cardiff, and found his way to Queen Mary University of London via UEA, Oxford, and Aberdeen. He is the author and editor of numerous books on the history of news, cheap print, Milton, and angels, most recently, with Noah Moxham, News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2016). He has just completed a two-volume edition of Milton’s Latin defences for OUP, and is writing a book on the history of news communication for Penguin. He is also engaged in various projects in the creative arts.
Tracey A. Sowerby (University of Oxford) researches early modern political culture and religion, with a particular focus on diplomatic practices and cultures. She was principal investigator on two diplomacy-related projects ‘Textual Ambassadors: Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World’, funded by the AHRC and ‘Centres of Diplomacy, Centres of Culture’ funded by the British Academy. She is the author of Renaissance and Reform in Tudor England: the Careers of Sir Richard Morison
c.1513–1556 (Oxford, 2010) and is co-editor, with Jan Hennings, of Practices of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World c.1410–1800 (London, 2017).
Christine Vogel is Professor of European History (seventeenth–nineteenth centuries) at the University of Vechta (Germany). Formerly she was a research assistant at the University of Rostock and an associate member of the GRC-Research Group ‘Self-Narratives in Transcultural Perspective’ at the Freie Universität Berlin. She was awarded a Feodor-Lynen Fellowship by the Humboldt Foundation and was a visiting fellow at the Université Paris IV-Sorbonne in 2009–10. She is the author of Der Untergang der Gesellschaft Jesu als europäisches Medienereignis: publizistische Debatten im Spannungsfeld von Aufklärung und Gegenaufklärung (Mainz, 2006), and co-editor with Peter Burschel of Die Audienz: ritualisierter Kulturkontakt in der Frühen Neuzeit (Cologne, 2014), and, with Claudia Garnier, of Interkulturelle Ritualpraxis in der Vormoderne: diplomatische Interaktion an den östlichen Grenzen der Fürstengesellschaft (Berlin, 2016).
John Watkins is Distinguished McKnight University Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on sovereignty; cultural and diplomatic exchanges between England, France, and the Mediterranean; and the classical and medieval underpinnings of early modernity. His books include The Specter of Dido (New Haven, 1995); Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England (Cambridge, 2002); After Lavinia: A Literary History of Premodern Marriage Diplomacy (Ithaca, 2017); and with Carole Levin, Shakespeare’s Foreign Worlds: National and Transnational Identity in the Elizabethan Age (London, 2009). With Kathryn L. Reyerson, he is the co-editor of Mediterranean Identities in the Premodern Era: Entrepôts, Islands, Empires (Farnham, 2014).
Introduction
Literary and Diplomatic Cultures in the Early Modern World
Tracey A. Sowerby and Joanna Craigwood
LITERARY-DIPLOMATIC CULTURE
To Renaissance writers the close relationship between literature and diplomacy was self-evident. So much so that the Italian exile and professor of civil law Alberico Gentili devoted a chapter of his magnum opus on embassies to a discussion of ambassadors of literary attainments. Recognizing that a large number of distinguished litterateurs from every field of learning had undertaken diplomatic missions, his list included eminent theologians, philosophers, and jurists. Many were ancient authors such as Aristotle, Cicero, and Diogenes, but several, including Ermolao Barbaro, Guillaume Budé, and Francesco Guicciardini, were Gentili’s near contemporaries.1 Gentili could easily have added many names to his list for a significant number of early modern European diplomats were writers including some of the foremost political, legal, and literary authors of the European Renaissance, men such as Niccolò Machiavelli, Bernardino de Mendoza, and Thomas Wyatt. This emphasis on the literary accomplishments of early modern ambassadors should come as no surprise: high among the skills early modern diplomats needed were oratory and eloquence and much of an ambassador’s work was textual—writing reports, composing speeches, writing letters.2
Indeed, for Gentili, as for so many humanists, literary writing and political service were not mutually exclusive spheres of activity, but could be meaningfully interwoven. He believed that the attention of ambassadors ‘can always be brought to the responsibilities of public life, especially if their literary activities are not widely divorced from those responsibilities’ and that an ambassador’s literary education should ideally be directed towards serving the common good. Gentili wanted well-educated ambassadors whose literary studies would bear on ‘practical politics
1 Alberico Gentili, De legationibus libri tres, ed. Gordon J. Laing, 2 vols (New York, 1924), II.159–61.
2 See for example Douglas Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, IL, 2002), chs. 4–5; Isabella Lazzarini, Communication and Conflict: Italian Diplomacy in the Early Renaissance, 1350–1620 (Oxford, 2015), esp. parts II and IV.
Tracey A. Sowerby and Joanna Craigwood and [. . .] the administration of high offices’.3 The authors of other diplomatic handbooks also made this association. Ottaviano Maggi outlined an extensive list of subjects and authors that an ambassador should read, including literary texts, in preparation for diplomatic service.4
The links between literature and diplomacy went much deeper. Many diplomatic commentators and theorists found that literary tropes provided a language that helped them to make sense of diplomacy itself. For the French civil lawyer and occasional diplomat Jean Hotman distinguishing between ‘ An Ambassage and a Comedie’ provided a useful way to explain the singular representational identity required of an ambassador, for during an embassy ‘a man cannot [. . .] play diuerse partes vnder diuers garments’ without risking both his and his master’s honour.5 One century later, Abraham de Wicquefort also considered the relationship between comedy and diplomacy. With a hint of satire, he recommended that an ambassador ‘ought to have the Tincture of the Comedian’ for ‘there is not a more illustrious Theatre than a Court; neither is there any Comedy, where the Actors seem less what they are in effect, than Embassadors do in their Negotiation’.6 Whereas for Hotman parallels with the stage highlighted the need for straight dealing, at least as far as it concerned only taking on one mission for one master at a time, for Wicquefort they suggested the highly performative, dissimulative practices of contemporary diplomacy.
The use of a literary vocabulary when trying to comprehend diplomatic activity was not limited to the—admittedly numerous—diplomatic manuals produced in early modern Europe.7 A wide range of European diplomats found that literary tropes provided a useful repertoire with which to describe and analyse the performative political cultures they encountered at foreign courts. For instance Sir Thomas Roe reported of the court of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir that ‘this sitting out hath soe much affinitye with a theatre—the manner of the king in his gallery; the great men lifted on a stage as actors; the vulgar below gazing on—that an easy description will informe of the place and fashion’.8 Deploying the analogy to London public theatres helped Roe to explain the hierarchical use of space within Mughal court ceremony.9 On other occasions employing theatrical tropes permitted Roe to downplay the political significance of his acceptance of robes of honour from the Mughal Emperor, commenting that the cloak would have suited an actor playing Tamerlane, or to denigrate his political rivals, such as the Persian
3 Gentili, De legationibus, II. 159–61.
4 Ottaviano Maggi, De legato libri duo (Venice, 1566), Book II, esp. 55–7.
5 Jean Hotman, The Ambassador (London, 1603), F7v.
6 Abraham de Wicquefort, The embassador and his functions, trans. J. Digby (London, 1716), 294.
7 For a survey of the handbooks see Catherine Fletcher, Diplomacy in Renaissance Rome: the Rise of the Resident Ambassador (Cambridge, 2015), 38–42; H. Kugeler, ‘ “Le parfait ambassadeur”. The Theory and Practice of Diplomacy in the Century Following the Peace of Westphalia’, D.Phil. thesis University of Oxford (2006).
8 The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, 1615–19: as Narrated in his Journal and Correspondence, ed. William Foster (London, 1899), 87.
9 On Mughal ceremonial see Stephen P. Blake, Time in Early Modern Islam: Calendar, Ceremony and Chronology in the Safavid, Mughal and Ottoman Empires (Cambridge, 2013).
3 ambassador, whom he described as ‘rather a Iester or Iugler then a Person of any gravety, running vp and downe, and acting all his woordes like a mimick Player’.10 Roe’s links to English dramatists11 go some way towards explaining his choice of strategy, but other European diplomats, without comparable connections, invoked similar parallels too.
Many ambassadors found a descriptive vocabulary for diplomacy that was drawn from literature and drama useful because they perceived close resonances between the representational and performative nature of the two activities, resonances that helped them to understand the cultural relativism at play between their host and their home courts. Ogier de Busbecq, the Imperial ambassador to Sultan Suleiman I in 1555, likened his own actions as ambassador to acting and used the genre he invoked to add further layers of meaning, writing that he processed to take leave of the Sultan after his failure to secure a permanent peace between the Emperor and the Ottomans ‘as though I were going to play the part of Agamemnon or some similar hero in a tragedy’.12 On the surface Roe and Busbecq’s adoption of a dramatic framework for their analyses may appear to be inflected by exoticism, the reaction of an ambassador to the unfamiliar phenomena he encountered in a polity with a far different normative system.13 However, such analogies are also frequently found within intra-European diplomatic discourse, and dated back to the use of actors as diplomats among ancient Greek city-states, as early modern commentators knew.14 These references even extended to using the plots of plays as an analytical short hand. Hence Christopher Mundt could liken the actions of Otto Truchess von Waldburg, Cardinal of Augsburg, to those of Davus in Andria.15 Despite shifts in the attitudes with which contemporary commentators and political actors approached diplomacy, literary and dramatic tropes remained a useful conceptual tool for making sense of the processes and practices of inter-princely and interstate relations throughout the early modern period. From the hermeneutic manipulation of proto-novelistic narrative to make sense of a sixteenth-century Portuguese-Vijayanagar encounter to the late-seventeenth-century employment of the emerging literary-aesthetic term ‘genius’ to describe diplomatic wit, diplomatic discourses drew on evolving literary references, genres, and values.16
10 Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 300, 334.
11 On Roe’s possible links to English poets and dramatists see Colin Mitchell, Sir Thomas Roe and the Mughal Empire (Karachi, 2000), 55–9.
12 The Turkish Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, Imperial Ambassador at Constantinople, 1554–1562, ed. Edward S. Forster (Oxford, 1927), 64.
13 For this interpretation see Jyotsna G. Singh, Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: ‘Discoveries’ of India in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1996), 19–51.
14 Pat Easterling and Edith Hall (eds), Greek and Roman Actors: Aspects of an Ancient Profession (Cambridge, 2002), 332–3. For knowledge of this ancient practice see An Apology For Actors (London, 1612), C2v–C3r.
15 TNA SP 70/5, fo. 126v [CSPF I 977].
16 Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski, ‘The Queen of Onor and her Emissaries: Fernão Mendes Pinto’s Dialogue with India’, in Brinda Charry and Gitanjali Shahani (eds), Emissaries in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Mediation, Transmission, Traffic, 1550–1700 (Farnham, 2009), 167–91 (168–79); London Metropolitan Archives, ACC/0510, Matthew Prior to the Earl of Jersey, July 8/18, 1699.
Tracey A. Sowerby and Joanna Craigwood
One reason for the use of literary parallels in diplomatic descriptions was undoubtedly the increasing preponderance of literary men among those serving their princes abroad from the fifteenth century. Indeed, the careers of Renaissance diplomats bear out Gentili’s confidence that literature and diplomacy were compatible, even complementary, as so many were renowned poets, dramatists, translators, and polemicists. Others were influential literary patrons and many moved within literary circles. Diplomats’ minds also no doubt turned to literary parallels so regularly for the simple reason that literary composition was embedded within diplomatic culture in many parts of the early modern world. A brief examination of the uses of poetry within diplomatic practice highlights just how integral literary composition and texts were. In the areas once dominated by classical Chinese, poetry that drew upon a shared logographic system frequently paralleled the official negotiations and provided a means of commenting upon them.17 Korean envoys to China were sometimes tasked with composing poems as part of their missions, while by the end of the eighteenth century, poetry was still sufficiently closely linked to Chinese diplomacy that the Quianlong Emperor personally composed a poem to celebrate George McCartney’s embassy.18 Poems were exchanged within and alongside letters between princes in Islamicate Eurasia, while European queens might send poems to one another as gifts.19 Poems were written to celebrate important and unusual diplomatic gifts: the giraffes that al-Mu’izz of Tunis and Lorenzo de Medici received from the Mamluk sultans were celebrated in verse.20 Meanwhile polemical verse could continue hostilities in the absence of open war.21 As several of the essays in this volume suggest, the prestige attached to poetry made it a useful vehicle for building cultural capital and, thereby, diplomatic benefit.
Another reason was the centrality of humanist rhetorical culture to the development of both European diplomacy and literature during this period.22 Scholars have long known that early modern Europe adopted the Roman practice of referring to ambassadors as orators, and that they were accordingly expected to be eloquent.23 Humanist rhetoric—the art of speaking and writing well and persuasively informed by the studia humanitatis or the study of grammar, poetry, history, rhetoric, and moral philosophy—influenced developments in Italian diplomacy. 24 Humanist oratorical displays served as cultural gifts between Italian city-states in ritual
17 For example Liam C. Kelley, Beyond the Bronze Pillars: Envoy Poetry and the Sino-Vietnamese Relationship (Honolulu, 2005).
18 Dane Alston, ‘Empire and Emissary: the Hongwu Emperor, Kwon Kun, and the Poetry of Late Fourteenth-Century Diplomacy’, Korean Studies, 32 (2008), 104–47.
19 Cihan Yüksel Muslu, The Ottomans and the Mamluks: Imperial Diplomacy and Warfare in the Islamic World (London, 2014), 36, 333n.22; Peter C. Herman, Royal Poetrie: Monarchic Verse and the Political Imaginary of Early Modern England (Ithaca, 2010), 68–71.
20 Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Practising Diplomacy in the Mamluk Sultanate: Gifts and Material Culture in the Medieval Islamic world (London, 2014), 113, 141–2.
21 David Carlson, ‘Politicizing Tudor Court Literature: Gaguin’s Embassy and Henry VII’s Humanists’ Response’, StP, 85 (1988), 279–304.
22 Timothy Hampton, Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, 2009), 14–44.
23 Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (Harmondsworth, 1955), 186; Donald E. Queller, The Office of Ambassador in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1967), 60–76; for example Hotman, Ambassador, C2v: ‘in many places Ambassadors are called Orators’.
24 Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries, 16, 101–52.
and Diplomatic
5 per formances bound up with diplomatic honour and shame. 25 The humanist absorption of a classical cultural heritage characterized by shared stories, Ciceronian rhetoric, and linguistic and syntactical borrowings from Latin created the cultural connections and common political language that allowed first Italian and then wider European diplomats to negotiate fragmented political geographies. 26 By the late sixteenth century, northern European writers were already parodying the established diplomatic exploitation of classical rhetoric and literature.27
Humanist oratory became such a powerful part of European diplomatic ritual that early voyagers to North America drew on it as an interpretative framework for understanding rituals of encounter among indigenous societies.28 Captain John Smith describes the leader Powhatan as greeting him with ‘a great Oration made by three of his Nobles’ on his arrival in what would become Virginia as ‘a publike confirmation of a perpetuall league and friendship’.29 Despite his ultimate inability to understand or adequately convey indigenous speech, which he reframes within classical humanist reference sets, Smith’s accounts do also show that stylized oratorical performances were integral to Powhatan diplomatic ceremony: ‘if any great commander arrive’, Smith recounts, ‘2. or more of their chiefest men make an oration, testifying their love. Which they do with such vehemency and so great passions, that they sweate till they drop, and are so out of breath they can scarce speake.’30
Likewise when the Portuguese chronicler Rui de Pina praises Prince Jelen of Senegambia for his oratory on a visit to King John II in Lisbon, his words may reflect the fictional imposition of humanist expectations on this written account, but they may also reflect the skilful negotiation of European rhetorical ritual by the African prince.31 After all, as the Italian diplomat Gaspare Bragaccia pointed out in 1626, the ambassador ‘must possess practised eloquence to know how to persuade in both speech and writing’ making him in essence a ‘man of language’.32
DIPLO-LITERARY STUDIES AND THE NEW DIPLOMATIC HISTORY
As the web of diplomatic discourse informed by humanist intellectual culture engaged with many of the same concerns as early modern literature, current scholarship is increasingly recognizing the importance of understanding the dialogue
25 Brian Jeffrey Maxson, The Humanist World of Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, 2014), 85–106.
26 Lazzarini, Communication and Conflict, 7.
27 Warren Boutcher, ‘ “Who taught thee Rhetoricke to deceive a maid?”: Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Juan Boscán’s Leandro, and Renaissance Vernacular Humanism’, Comparative Literature 52 (2000), 11–52 (45–9).
28 Sandra M. Gustafson, Eloquence is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000), 5–8.
29 John Smith, A True relation of such occurrences and accidents of note, as hath hapned in Virginia (1608), in Philip Barbour (ed.), The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, 1580–1631, 3 vols (Chapel Hill, NC, 1986), I.65.
30 Smith, A Map of Virginia (1612), in Barbour (ed.), Complete Works, I.167–8.
31 Rui de Pina, Crónica de El-Rei D. João II, ed. Alberto Martins de Carvalho (Coimbra, 1950), 92. For an assessment of Pina’s account see Ivana Elbl, ‘Cross-cultural Trade and Diplomacy: Portuguese Relations with West Africa, 1441–1521’, Journal of World History, 3 (1992), 188–92.
32 Gaspare Bragaccia, L’Ambasciatore (Padua, 1626), 123.
Tracey A. Sowerby and Joanna Craigwood between these spheres.33 Timothy Hampton first compellingly demonstrated the powerful symbiotic relationship between the overlapping diplomatic and literary cultures of early modern Europe Diplomatic culture was semiotic and symbolic in nature, invested in the production of signs, shaped by practices of communication, interpretation and linguistic exchange, and plagued by problems of reading and writing. That was both why literary skills, tools, and comparisons were so useful to diplomacy and why literary texts provided so powerful a lens through which to read and reflect upon diplomatic practices.34 The depiction of diplomatic activity within literary texts—Hampton’s ‘diplomatic moment’—in turn allowed writers to reflect on their own analogous ability to represent, on their semiotic practices and limitations, and on the genre conventions that framed and controlled such multilayered scenes of negotiation. 35 Hampton has shown how responses to the new practices and discourses of diplomacy that emerged as Europe increasingly adopted resident embassies shaped the evolution of three major genres—the essay, epic, and tragedy.36 His Fictions of Embassy inspired widespread interest in what he has called a ‘diplomatic poetics’: a way of reading literature that acknowledges its role in negotiating relationships between polities and a way of reading diplomacy that takes into account its fictional and linguistic dimensions.37 Hampton’s emphasis on the links between humanism and diplomatic culture and his interest in the changing techniques and structures of representation that eventually lead to resident diplomacy might seem to imply that the literarydiplomatic synergy was unique to European Renaissance culture. While there was undoubtedly something distinctive about the literary impetus within the diplomatic cultures of European princes and the diplomatic impulses within Renaissance literature, a close relationship between diplomacy and literature also existed in many other parts of the world. At the most basic level the use of skilled writers within diplomacy was not an exclusively European phenomenon. As research on other areas has established, many non-European societies valued literary accomplishments in diplomatic circles and believed them advantageous to diplomacy. Scholars frequently served alongside military men as envoys in Ottoman-Mamluk diplomacy.38 Literary skill in Persian and Arabic was prized in many parts of Asia, while Islamic princes used allusions from a shared literary tradition when writing to each other.39 It is important to acknowledge the dynamics of diplo-literary culture in other parts of the globe. Yet no volume can be comprehensive in its geographic coverage and this volume is no exception. Some parts of the world have left insufficient written sources from this period to permit analysis of the links between their literary and diplomatic cultures; and there is a relative paucity of entirely extra-European research into literary-diplomatic relations within Anglophone
33 Hampton, Fictions of Embassy, 12. 34 Ibid., 6–72.
35 Ibid ; Timothy Hampton, ‘The Diplomatic Moment: Representing Negotiation in Early Modern Europe’, Modern Language Quarterly, 67 (2006), 81–102 (82).
36 Hampton, Fictions of Embassy, passim, but see 6–7 on diplomatic genres. 37 Ibid , 2.
38 Muslu, Ottomans and the Mamluks, 27, 73–4, 157.
39 For example Colin Mitchell, ‘Safavid Imperial tarassul and the Persian inshā’ Tradition’, Studia Iranica, 26 (1997), 173–209.
academia. Instead, this collection invites readers to make comparisons between literary-diplomatic cultures in different parts of the early modern world by incorporating several essays that examine the relationship between literature and diplomacy in missions beyond Europe. In doing so, it aims to question the exceptionality of the relationship between Renaissance humanism and literature and to encourage future research into other regions.
Over the last decade literary critical interest in diplomacy has built broadly alongside and in response to Hampton’s diplomatic poetics. Scholars have examined performances of plays, masques, and rituals before ambassadors, as well as the (sometimes controversial) consumption of diplomatic affairs through public stageplays, with an eye to the analogies between theatrical and diplomatic performance discussed above.40 They have started to reconstruct the relationship between diplomatic service and the composition of poetry through instances in which the cross-cultural exposure of embassies influenced national poetic traditions, diplomatic agendas and sources shed new light on poems, and poetic form and expression helped negotiate diplomatic difficulties.41 They have started to scrutinize sermons serving diplomatic agendas, the composition and circulation of polemical prose and news for diplomatic ends, and the use of narrative and rhetorical techniques and anecdotes from history, biography, and prose fiction to make sense of diplomatic events.42 Finally, they have begun to bring a literary toolkit to bear on diplomatic documents and activities, highlighting the aesthetic, formal, rhetorical, fictional, narrative, and material qualities of diplomatic writing and thought.43 At their best, these recent
40 For example András Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment: Drama and Political Knowledge in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2016), ch. 2; Nathalie Rivère de Carles (ed.), Early Modern Diplomacy, Theatre and Soft Power: The Making of Peace (London, 2016); Joanna Craigwood, ‘Diplomatic Metonymy and Antithesis in 3 Henry VI ’, Review of English Studies, 65 (272) (2014), 812–30; John H. Pollack, ‘Native Performances of Diplomacy and Religion in Early New France’, in Joshua D. Bellin and Laura L. Meikle (eds), Native Acts: Indian Performance, 1603–1832 (Lincoln, NE, 2011), 81–116; and select references in notes 44–9.
41 For example Lovro Kunčević, ‘The City whose “ships sail on every wind”: Representations of Diplomacy in the Literature of Early Modern Ragusa (Dubrovnik)’, in Tracey A. Sowerby and Jan Hennings (eds), Practices of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World, c.1410–1800 (London, 2017), 65–79; William Rossiter, Wyatt Abroad: Tudor Diplomacy and the Translation of Power (Martlesham, 2014); essays in Jason Powell and William Rossiter (eds), Authority and Diplomacy from Dante to Shakespeare (Farnham, 2013); Susan Brigden, Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest (London, 2012); Edward Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate: Culture, Politics and Institutions (Oxford, 2008), 6–36; Kelley, Beyond the Bronze Pillars; Alston, ‘Empire and Emissary’.
42 For example Hugh Adlington, ‘Donne and Diplomacy’, in Jeanne Shami (ed.), Renaissance Tropologies: the Cultural Imagination of Early Modern England (Pittsburgh, PA, 2008), 187–216; Rosanna Cox, ‘ “The mountains are in labour, only mice are born”: Milton and Republican Diplomacy’, Renaissance Studies, 24 (2010), 420–36; Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham (eds), News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2016); Katherine M. MacDonald, ‘Diplomacy and Biography in the Wars of Religion: Charles Paschal’s Life of Guy du Faur de Pibrac (1584)’, in Bruno Tribout and Ruth Whelan (eds), Narrating the Self in Early Modern Europe (Bern, 2007), 23–40.
43 For example Sabine Lucia Müller, ‘William Harborne’s Embassies: Scripting, Performing and Editing Anglo-Ottoman Diplomacy’, in Sabine Schülting, Savine Lucia Müller, and Ralf Hertel (eds), Early Modern Encounters with the Islamic East: Performing Cultures (Farnham, 2012), 11–26; Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox (eds), Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture (London, 2011); Thomas V. Cohen and Germain Warketin (eds), Things Not Easily Believed: Introducing the Early Modern Relation =RR, 34/1–2 (2011); Charry and Shahani (eds), Emissaries, part 1.
Tracey A. Sowerby and Joanna Craigwood studies have steered a course between the highly context-specific and isolated character of earlier historicist readings of literary works within diplomatic settings44 and the generalizing and imprecise New Historicist use of ‘diplomacy’ in its broadest social meaning to denote the negotiation of any power relations.45 Books by John Watkins on pre-modern marriage diplomacy, Ellen Welch on French diplomacy and the performing arts, and Christopher Warren on literature and the law of nations have compellingly placed readings of individual works within the wider relationship between early modern literary and diplomatic culture.46 The field they have helped initiate brings together a constellation of recent interests within early modern literary studies: translation, travel writing, networks, cross-cultural encounter, rhetoric, letters, news, espionage, the law, the material text, the archive, cultural and political history and theory, and new forms of historicism.
Meanwhile there have been significant developments in scholarly approaches to the history of diplomacy.47 The work of Donald Queller and Garrett Mattingly dominated studies of late medieval and early modern diplomacy for much of the later twentieth century. Over the last two decades or so, there have been repeated calls for new methodological and theoretical approaches to diplomatic history; John Watkins placed literature at the heart of his appeal.48 The ‘new diplomatic history’ that has emerged integrates broader concerns—such as ambassadors’ agency and ritual action—into a field that was once dominated by the study of bureaucracy and foreign policy.49 Historians continue to analyse the traditional documents, foreign policy decisions, and peace congresses that have always been at the heart of diplomatic history, but do so using new methodologies and asking new questions.50 This necessitates rethinking our approaches to a range of diplomatic texts and opens up new avenues through which to do so. In common with literary studies, for instance, diplomatic history has experienced a ‘material turn’ that explores the significance of the material artefacts and environments associated with negotiations,
44 For example Paul Sellin, So Doth, So Is Religion: John Donne and Diplomatic Contexts in the Reformed Netherlands, 1619–1620 (Columbia, 1988).
45 For example Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (London, 1980), chs 1, 3.
46 John Watkins, After Lavinia: A Literary History of Premodern Marriage Diplomacy (Ithaca, 2017), chs 5–6; Ellen R. Welch, A Theater of Diplomacy: International Relations and the Performing Arts in Early Modern France (Philadelphia, 2017); Christopher Warren, Literature and the Law of Nations, 1580–1680 (Oxford, 2015).
47 See Tracey A. Sowerby, ‘Early Modern Diplomatic History’, History Compass, 14/9 (2016), 441–56; Jan Hennings and Tracey A. Sowerby, ‘Introduction: Practices of Diplomacy’, in Sowerby and Hennings (eds), Practices of Diplomacy, 1–21.
48 For example Karl W. Schweizer and Matt J. Schumann, ‘The Revitalisation of Diplomatic History: Renewed Reflections’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 19/2 (2008), 149–86; John Watkins (ed.), ‘Toward a New Diplomatic History of Medieval and Early Modern Europe’ = JMEMS, 38/1 (2008), esp. 1–14.
49 For example Karina Urbach, ‘Diplomatic History since the Cultural Turn’, HJ, 46 (2003), 991–7; Torstan Riotte and Markus Mösslang (eds), The Diplomats’ World: A Cultural History of Diplomacy, 1815–1914 (Oxford, 2008).
50 For example Lucein Bély, La société des princes, XVIe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1999); Daniela Frigo (ed.), Politics and Diplomacy in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge, 1999); Christoph Kampmann, Maximilian Lanzinner, and Guido Braun (eds), L’art de la paix: Kongresswesen und Friedensstiftung im Zeitalter des Westfälischen Friedens (Münster, 2011); Carlo M. Bajetta, Guillaume Coatelen, and Jonathan Gibson (eds), Elizabeth I’s Foreign Correspondence: Letters, Rhetoric, and Politics (Basingstoke, 2014).
and could profitably be extended into the textual world of diplomacy, as Tracey Sowerby’s contribution to this volume demonstrates.51 The mutual relevance of her analysis of the ceremonial diplomatic reception of decorated letters and Hampton’s discussion, in his chapter, of the diplomatic significance of the destruction of two material ‘ambassadors’—a royal portrait and a text—in Calderón’s 1628 play El Príncipe Constante exemplifies this kind of shared interest.
Lucien Bély has encouraged us to view early modern international relations as occurring within a ‘society of princes’, where the familial interests of individual rulers dictated the foreign policy of their countries, even as those same polities developed sophisticated bureaucracies.52 Bély’s emphasis on dynastic concerns has helped to highlight the importance of sociability and familial networks at the highest levels of diplomatic activity. More recent scholarship has also viewed diplomacy as a socio-political process and placed more weight on the importance of individual diplomats’ actions and networks.53 It has often defined ‘diplomat’ more broadly than earlier scholarship, incorporating the interpreters, secretaries, and other actors who served below the level of accredited ambassador into our understanding of the diplomatic process.54 At the same time, scholars have recognized that nonprincely polities engaged in asymmetric relations with the ‘society of princes’. The strategies they adopted in order to gain diplomatic recognition have profound repercussions for our understanding of these polities’ diplomatic reports and ceremonial records.55 These findings about the identities, networks, and transactions of early modern diplomatic actors inevitably affect our understanding of how literary products and skills might fit into this complex, multi-dimensional, and contingent diplomatic landscape.
Diplomacy was both a written and a performative activity. By paying attention to diplomatic performances, particularly the meaning of ritual within diplomatic audiences, historians have shown the non-verbal means by which relations between princes were mediated. Ceremonial gestures, titles, and spatial hierarchies all
51 For example Harriet Rudolph and Gregor M. Metzig (eds), ‘Material Culture in Modern Diplomacy from the 15th to the 20th Century’, Jahrbuch für Europäische Geschichte, 17 (2016); Nancy Ulm and Leah R. Clark (eds), The Art of Embassy: Objects and Images of Early Modern Diplomacy = JEMH, 20/1 (2016); Mark Häberlein and Christof Jeggle (eds), Materielle Grundlagen der Diplomatie: Schenken, Sammeln und Verhandeln in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Konstanz, 2013); Maija Jansson, Art and Diplomacy: Seventeenth-century English Decorated Royal Letters to Russia and the Far East (Leiden, 2015).
52 Bély, La société des princes
53 For example Hillard von Thiessen and Christian Windler (eds), Akteure der Aussenbeziehungen: Netzwerke und Interkulturalität im historischen Wandel (Cologne, 2010).
54 For example Daniel Riches, Protestant Cosmopolitanism and Diplomatic Culture: BrandenburgSwedish Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden, 2013); Martje van Gelder and Tijana Krstić (eds), Cross-confessional Diplomacy and Diplomatic Intermediaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean = JEMH, 19/2–3 (2015).
55 On asymmetry in diplomatic practice see Tilman Haug, Nadir Weber, and Christian Windler (eds), Protegierte und Protektoren: Asymmetrische politische Beziehungen zwischen Partnerschaft und Dominanz (16. bis frühes 20. Jahrhundert) (Cologne, 2016); André Krischer, Reichsstädte in der Fürstengesellschaft: Politischer Zeichengebrauch in der frühen Neuzeit (Darmstadt, 2006).
