Trans-Imperial Archive-Making: Diplomatic Entanglements between Venice and Istanbul
How did early modern diplomatic archives form across vast distances? What role did various kinds of practitioners – diplomats, secretaries, scribes, and dragomans (diplomatic translator-interpreters) – play in connecting metropolitan chanceries with colonial outposts, both within and across shifting imperial boundaries? What did it mean for these practitioners, collectively and individually, to make the writings of one imperial chancery accessible, discoverable, legible, and meaningful to readers in other languages, spaces, and jurisdictions? This presentation considers the entanglement of Venetian and Ottoman archive-making in both Istanbul and the Venetian-Ottoman borderlands in Dalmatia to highlight the trans-imperial dimensions of early modern archivality in general and the role therein of specific practices of commensuration in particular.
Date: 11 October 2022, 16:30 (Tuesday, 1st week, Michaelmas 2022)
Venue: St Edmund Hall, Queen's Lane OX1 4AR
Venue Details: Old Dining Hall
Speaker: Natalie Rothman (Toronto)
Organiser contact email address: earlymodernitaly@history.ox.ac.uk
Part of: Early Modern Italian World Seminar
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Public
Editors: Laura Spence, Belinda Clark