In 2022, Anna Collar wrote that “over the last fifteen years, network methods and language have increased in popularity and scope in archaeological and historical applications, making network approaches to the past one of the strongest emerging research areas in our disciplines.” [1] As its title indicates, the book under consideration here reflects this historiographical trend toward network approaches to the past. Indeed, Suzan Folkerts and Margriet Hoogvliet begin their theoretical introduction to the book by stating that Network Theory and Transnational History “can be used to approach the flow of religious texts among individuals, groups, networks, and spaces, as well as through connecting links, during the late Middle Ages and the early modern period” (19). They thereby seemingly combine several interpretive metaphors (e.g., flow, network, and space) that others would treat as distinct, [2] even while emphasizing the importance of networks and stating that the contributions to this volume all “focus on networks of religious texts and networks of readers” (29). Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, then, most of the essays collected here (after the theoretical introduction) assume the interpretive value of the network metaphor without engaging network theory in any detailed or robust way, if at all.
Like other volumes in this same series, Networking Europe seeks to accentuate the agency of the laity (in contrast to clerical elites) and to argue for a transnational understanding of late medieval and early modern European history (in contrast to more traditional national histories). These essays, all in English, derive from meetings of the COST Action Group 3 (“European Networks of Knowledge Exchange”), and they show some of the qualities of papers presented at an academic conference with a very broad theme. Geographically, they range quite widely from Spain to Poland, from Belgrade to the “New World.” Chronologically, they deal mainly with the sixteenth century, but at least one (by Manual F. Fernández Chaves) examines a document from 1732 (i.e., outside the temporal parameters stated in the book’s title). The essays are arranged into three sections: 1) “European Connections,” focusing on religious texts; 2) “Exiles, Diasporas, and Migrants,” addressing textual networks; and 3) “Mobility and Dissemination,” treating mobility and travel networks (13). It is noteworthy that, both in the table of contents and in the body of the book, the third section is actually entitled “Mobility and Merchants.”
Rafael M. Pérez García’s chapter on Francisco de Osuna’s Tercer Abecedario Espiritual presents Osuna as a pivotal figure (“the last major medieval mystic” and “the first major early modern mystic” [48]) in the medieval mystical tradition. Of course, some might see more variety and nuance in this tradition than the definite article suggests. This chapter makes scant mention of networks, but it does argue for a transnational spiritual tradition--one here aimed at “all social groups.” Osuna’s vernacular work underscores a potential paradox in seeing a transnational tradition expressed with linguistic particularity. But, as in his previous work, Pérez García seeks to place Spanish spirituality in a European-wide context.
Miroslawa Hanusiewicz-Lavellee’s discussion of a 1567 Polish-language Protestant martyrology (The History of Harsh Persecution of God’s Church) addresses this potential paradox more directly and argues that, though in the vernacular, this work shows a “truly European scope” (66) and makes “the local congregation feel part of a wider Reformed community” (67). TheHistory’s author, Cyprian Bazylik, aware of the lack of Polish Protestant martyrs, focused on the “universal church” to connect the local congregation with the much larger and international (or transnational) Protestant community.
To complexify or at least nuance the concept of “laity” in the early modern era, Marcin Polkowski studies the image of the laicus in books printed in Delft between 1477 and 1500. He argues that authors, printers, and publishers used the notion of laici as “a framing device for rhetorical purposes” and that they thereby “facilitated the creation of a ‘lay identity’” (74). Interestingly, this rhetorical strategy included paratextual images as well as text. That the lay identity--real or imagined--thus created was a rather broad or fluid one seems appropriate to what was at root a marketing program intended, at least in part, to increase sales.
Several of the essays in this volume address the connections between Spain and the Low Countries, perhaps none more directly than Ignacio García Pinilla’s study of Spanish merchants and dissidents in the commercial world of Bruges, Antwerp, and other business hubs. A central point in this essay is that religious ideas and commercial networks often follow similar and interconnected routes. García Pinilla’s call for greater collaboration between scholars of religion and economic historians (113) carries particular weight for those who wish to trace the movement of people, goods, and ideas.
Fernández Chaves continues the theme of the link between Spain and the Low Countries in his presentation of the library of the Flemish Nation’s “pious house” in Seville. As noted above, this contribution focuses on that library’s heretofore unstudied inventory of 1732. According to the author, through its library, this pious house (“half welfare organization...half corporate representation” [127-128]) sought to demonstrate “social and confessional prestige” and “the clarity and purity of [its] Catholic faith” (141). The essay includes an “edition” of the inventory (sometimes also called a “catalogue”) that is rather uneven in its editorial practices, sometimes, for example, identifying scribal errors, sometimes not. Among the many possible emendations and/or improvements one might offer to this edition, I’ll simply propose one: the entry Homildee [sic!] fratis Hironimi Sabonarolee, un tomo, called an “unidentified work” (160), is likely Savonarola’s Homiliae in totum libellum Ruth...printed several times in Salamanca in the mid-sixteenth century. [3]
The final section of the book opens with Natalia Maillard Álvarez’s chapter on the interactions between book merchants, printers, and the Spanish Inquisition in the sixteenth century both in Europe and in the “Hispanic monarchy.” Her essay shows the complexity of these interactions, even as the central Inquisition sought increasing control of the book trade. For example, some booksellers, while often the target of censorious suspicions, also collaborated with the Inquisition to gain a competitive advantage over business rivals (188). At the same time, Maillard Álvarez argues that the Inquisition itself “exhibited a sense of pragmatism [e.g., permitting fraudulent transactions as long as heretical books were not involved] that could create some space for tolerance” (190). In short, this chapter suggests that both book purveyors and book censors benefited in various ways from these pragmatic interactions.
It is perhaps primarily the focus on merchants that connects Maillard Álvarez’s chapter with Vladimir Abramović’s subsequent discussion of Ragusan (= modern-day Dubrovnik) traders in the colony of Belgrade in the sixteenth century. As Abramović describes, these traders were involved in various businesses, including the book business, and one such merchant, Trojan Gundulić, established the first printing press in Belgrade and published the first book there in 1552 (208). Abramović argues that the Ragusan presence in Belgrade influenced Serbian literacy and fostered the development of the “Republic of Letters” in early modern southeastern Europe.
In the book’s final essay, Margriet Hoogvliet returns us more explicitly to the concept of networks as she examines three late fifteenth and early sixteenth century pilgrims’ accounts written by pilgrims originating in the Low Countries and France. Rather surprisingly, hers is the only chapter in the book that includes maps, and they are quite helpful, even necessary. As Hoogvliet notes, these pilgrims’ accounts “give highly relevant and rarely studied information about travel networks and the existence of transnational social and commercial networks” (220). She focuses on three points: pilgrim accounts as sources about medieval travel and travel networks; pilgrim accounts as sources about trans-European social and commercial networks; and pilgrims themselves (both as travelers and as authors) as transmitters of religious knowledge. In many ways, Hoogvliet’s essay most successfully delivers on the promise of the book’s title.
Each contribution to this volume includes a rich and relevant bibliography (Abramović only lists works in Serbian or Croatian). There is no index. Despite their individual high quality, the cohesiveness of these contributions is not always so clear. Of course, in some way, all these admirably researched studies address or allude to “knowledge in transit,” [4] so one might expect wide-ranging geographical and even thematic variety. But whether they are adequately unified by the metaphor of the network or by the concept of transnationalism remains an open question.
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Notes:
1. Anna Collar, ed., Networks and the Spread of Ideas in the Past: Strong Ties, Innovation and Knowledge Exchange (New York: Routledge, 2022), 2.
2. See, e.g., Manuel A. Vasquez, "Studying Religion in Motion: A Networks Approach," Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 20 (2008): 151-184.
3. See, e.g., https://www.ustc.ac.uk/editions/345962.
4. See James A. Secord, “Knowledge in Transit,” Isis 95, no. 4 (2004): 654-72.