Textuality and Diversity: A Literary History of Europe and its Global Connections, 1545-1659

This five-year programme of investigation of 52 textual corpora includes Mesoamerican codices, Jesuit neo-Latin plays, popular songs, Kongolese documents in Portuguese, Cervantes’ works, examples of live speech from archives, and many others. It will produce an interdisciplinary literary history of Europe and its global connections for the period between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. The Reformation had fragmented Christendom into differing religious identities. Europeans were multiplying encounters with peoples and cultures in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. TextDiveGlobal challenges the legacy of nineteenth-century European literary-historical scholarship insofar as it durably organised the textual heritage connected with Europe from the perspective of distinct western European national literary canons and histories, and the comparisons and relations between them. Using analytical and linguistic-geographical criteria, it selects a wide and multilingual range of textual objects and forms both made and encountered by Europeans, in relation to spaces from Mexico to China, and events from the Church Council of Trent (1545) to the diplomatic Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659). The objective is to understand how textual and sociocultural diversity inform one another in different contexts and regions of this multifarious world. The methodology is a global-historical anthropology of texts grouped into corpora assembled on four interrelated principles: works, forms, spaces, events. Outputs include a two-volume summa (Oxford University Press), a database of information and images relating to the corpora, and a series of seminars across the USA and Europe. In each of five year-long phases of the research, a sub-team of experts and PDRFs will meet with the PI across the year, in weekly meetings and in two formal workshops. There will be small peer review groups across the phases; all events and draft chapters will be available to the whole group online.