Studies in Early Modern European History Visible Strangers

A collection of essays on the nature of cultural pluralism in the Mediterranean and the different ways in which this was managed in various cities during the early modern period. Visible strangers is a collective work that rethinks the study of the identity categories that characterised the Mediterranean space in the early modern era.The book’s nine chapters consider new case studies, offering a diachronic overview on the management, expression and negotiation of diversity in early modern cities and how this evolved from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Central to the volume is the concept of visibility as a unique form of identity expression and as a valuable opportunity to access otherness and cultural negotiation. Through the analysis of case studies of Adriatic cities such as Zadar, Venice, Ancona and Dubrovnik; of Valletta's Grand Port; of the Italian and Iberian peninsulas; and of travel reports to Istanbul and Alexandria, the book offers an expanded view of the materiality of cultural affiliations in the early modern Mediterranean.Each contribution offers a paradigm of historical and cultural phenomena related to coexistence, considered in the framework of a Mediterranean region as a system of microecologies connected by a shared history. This perspective provides the basis for discussing a Mediterranean model that can be usefully employed to investigate cultural pluralism in areas with similar characteristics, while overcoming the bias induced by Mediterraneanism. Visible strangers is a collection of essays on the nature of cultural pluralism in the Mediterranean and the different ways in which this was managed in various cities during the early modern period. The book’s nine chapters considers new case studies, where authors offer a diachronic view of the nature of the co-presence of minorities in different urban spaces, investigated through the lens of the fascinating relationship between visibility and identity. The considered case studies cover different areas of the Mediterranean space: the Adriatic, the Ottoman empire between Asia and Africa, the Italian and Iberian peninsulas, the island of Malta, at the centre of the Mare Nostrum and host to many of its influences. The analysis of the way cultural pluralism expressed itself wishes to overcome the bias induced by ‘Mediterraneanism’, that has led to the Mediterranean as an area of study hardening into a conceptual category.