A Companion to the Global Renaissance Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, 1500-1700

An innovative collection of original essays providing an expansive picture of globalization across the early modern world, now in its second edition

A Companion to the Global Renaissance: Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, 1500–1700, Second Edition provides readers with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of both macro and micro perspectives on the commercial and cross-cultural interactions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Covering a uniquely broad range of literary and cultural materials, historical contexts, and geographical regions, the Companion’s varied chapters offer interdisciplinary perspectives on the implications of early modern concepts of commerce, material and artistic culture, sexual and cross-racial encounters, conquest and enslavement, social, artistic, and religious cross-pollinations, geographical “discoveries,” and more.

Building upon the success of its predecessor, this second edition of A Companion to the Global Renaissance radically extends its scope by moving beyond England and English culture. Newly-commissioned essays investigate intercultural and intra-cultural exchanges, transactions, and encounters involving England, European powers, Eastern kingdoms, Africa, Islamic empires, and the Americas, within cross-disciplinary frameworks. Offering a complex and multifaceted view of early modern globalization, this new edition:

• Demonstrates the continuing global “turn” in Early Modern Studies through original essays exploring interconnected exchanges, transactions, and encounters
• Provides significantly expanded coverage of global interactions involving England, European powers such as Portugal, Spain, and The Netherlands, Eastern empires such as Japan, and the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires
• Includes a Preface and Afterword, as well as a revised and expanded Introduction summarizing the evolving field of Global Early Modern Studies and describing the motifs and methodologies informing the essays within the volume
• Explores an array of new subjects, including an exceptional woman traveler in Eurasia, the Jesuit presence in Mughal India and sixteenth-century Japan, the influence of Mughal art on an Amsterdam painter-cum-poet, the cultural impact of Eastern trade on plays and entertainments in early modern London, Safavid cultural disseminations, English and Portuguese slaving practices, the global contexts of English pattern poetry, and global lyric transmissions across cultures

A wide-ranging account of the global expansions and interactions of the period, A Companion to the Global Renaissance: Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, 1500–1700, Second Edition remains essential reading for early modern scholars and students ranging from undergraduate and graduate students to more advanced scholars and specialists in the field.

Jyotsna G. Singh is a Professor in the Department of English at Michigan State University, USA. She is the author or editor of numerous books including Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: “Discoveries” of India in the Language of Colonialism; Travel Knowledge: European “Discoveries” in the Early Modern Period (co-ed. with Ivo Kamps); Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory, A Companion to the Global Renaissance, and the book series Transculturalisms-1500-1800. Professor Singh has received visiting fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Queen Mary University of London, the John Carter Brown Library, and was most recently elected a Visiting Fellow at St Catherine’s College, Oxford University, UK.  

List of Illustrations viii

Notes on Contributors x

Acknowledgments xviii

Preface xix

Introduction: The Global Renaissance xxiv
Jyotsna G. Singh

Part I: Mapping the Global 1

1 The New Globalism: Transcultural Commerce, Global Systems Theory, and Spenser’s Mammon 3
Daniel Vitkus

2 “Travailing” Theory: Global Flows of Labor and the Enclosure of the Subject 22
Crystal Bartolovich

3 Islam and Tamburlaine’s World-Picture 37
John Michael Archer

4 Traveling Nowhere: Global Utopias in the Early Modern Period 50
Chloë Houston

5 Understanding Slavery in Early Modern Asia: Jesuit Scholarship from Seventeenth-Century Iberia and Asia 64
Stuart M. McManus

Part II: “Contact Zones” 79

6 “Apes of Imitation”: Imitation and Identity in Sir Thomas Roe’s Embassy to India 81
Nandini Das

7 Early Modern European Encounters with Japan: Luis Frois and Engelbert Kaempfer 95
Mihoko Suzuki

8 Other Renaissances, Multiple Easts, and Eurasian Borderlands: Teresa Sampsonia Sherley’s Journey from Persia to Poland, 1608–1611 115
Bernadette Andrea

9 Becoming Mughal, Becoming Dom João de Távora: Friendship, Dissimulation, and Manipulation in Jesuit and Mughal Exchanges 130
João Vicente Melo

10 The Queer Moor: Bodies, Borders, and Barbary Inns 149
Ian Smith

11 The Benefits of a Warm Study: The Resistance to Travel Before Empire 162
Andrew Hadfield

12 The Politics of Identity: Reassessing Global Encounters Through the Failure of the English East India Company in Japan 173
Catherine Ryu

13 Placing Iceland 184
Mary C. Fuller

14 East by Northeast: The English Among the Russians, 1553–1603 197
Gerald MacLean

15 Connected Political Imaginaries: The Shaˉhnaˉmah and Anglo-Persian Alliance Building, 1599–1628 210
Masoud Ghorbaninejad

Part III: “To Live by Traffic”: Global Networks of Exchange 229

16 The Unseen World of Willem Schellinks: Local Milieu and Global Circulation in the Visualization of Mughal India 231
Jos Gommans and Jan de Hond

17 Hakluyt’s Books and Hawkins’ Slaving Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade in the English National Imaginary, 1560–1600 249
Jyotsna G. Singh

18 Guns and Gawds: Elizabethan England’s “Infidel” Trade 276
Matthew Dimmock

19 Seeds of Sacrifice: Amaranth, The Gardens of Tenochtitlan, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene 290
Edward M. Test

20 “So Pale, So Lame, So Lean, So Ruinous”: The Circulation of Foreign Coins in Early Modern England 305
Stephen Deng

21 Canary, Bristoles, Londres, Ingleses: English Traders in the Canaries in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 319
Barbara Sebek

22 “The Whole Globe of the Earth”: Almanacs and Their Readers 332
Adam Smyth

23 Cesare Vecellio, Venetian Writer and Art-Book Cosmopolitan 341
Ann Rosalind Jones

24 A Multinational Corporation: Labor and Ethnicity in the London East India Company 360
Richmond Barbour

25 Patterning the Tatar Girl in George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesie (1589) 377
Ladan Niayesh

Part IV: The Globe Staged 387

26 Bettrice’s Monkey: Staging Exotica in Early Modern London Comedy 389
Jean E. Howard

27 The Maltese Factor: The Poetics of Place in The Jew of Malta and The Knight of Malta 402
Virginia Mason Vaughan

28 Local–Global Pericles: International Storytelling, Domestic Social Relations, Capitalism 415
David Morrow

29 Staging the Global in the Street: Spices, London Companies, and Thomas Middleton’s The Triumphs of Honor and Industry 433
Amrita Sen

Afterword: Lyric Poetics for the Global Renaissance 447
Ayesha Ramachandran

Index 457

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