This microhistory of the Salvagos-an Istanbul family of Venetian interpreters and spies travelling the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mediterranean-is a remarkable feat of the historian's craft of storytelling. With his father having been killed by secret order of Venice and his nephew to be publicly assassinated by Ottoman authorities, Genesino Salvago and his brothers started writing self-narratives. When crossing the borders of words and worlds, the Salvagos' self-narratives helped navigate at times beneficial, other times unsettling entanglements of empire, family, and translation. The discovery of an autobiographical text with rich information on Southeastern Europe, edited here for the first time, is the starting point of this extraordinary microbiography of a family's intense struggle for manoeuvring a changing world disrupted by competition, betrayal, and colonialism. This volume recovers the Venetian life stories of Ottoman subjects and the crucial role of translation in negotiating a shared but fragile Mediterranean. Stefan Hanss examines an interpreter's translational practices of the self and recovers the wider Mediterranean significance of the early modern Balkan contact zone. Offering a novel conversation between translation studies, Mediterranean studies, and the history of life-writing, this volume argues that dragomans' practices of translation, border-crossing, and mobility were key to their experiences and performances of the self. This book is an indispensable reading for the history of the early modern Mediterranean, self-narratives, Venice, the Ottoman Empire, and Southeastern Europe, as well as the history of translation. Hanss presents a truly fascinating narrative; a microhistory full of insights and rich perspectives.

This collection embraces the increasing interest in the material world of the Renaissance and the early modern period, which has both fascinated contemporaries and initiated in recent years a distinguished historiography. The scholarship within is distinctive for engaging with the agentive qualities of matter, showing how affective dimensions in history connect with material history, and exploring the religious and cultural identity dimensions of the use of materials and artefacts. It thus aims to refocus our understanding of the meaning of the material world in this period by centring on the vibrancy of matter itself. To achieve this goal, the authors approach "the material" through four themes - glass, feathers, gold paints, and veils - in relation to specific individuals, material milieus, and interpretative communities. In examining these four types of materialities and object groups, which were attached to different sensory regimes and valorizations, this book charts how each underwent significant changes during this period.

"This is a tour de force of sophisticated global erudition." -Filippo de Vivo, University of Oxford, UK "In its wide global range and rich variety of studies, this expertly edited volume provides an unprecedented view into the scribal practices of diverse cultural traditions in the early modern period." -Johanna Drucker, University of California, Los Angeles, USA "This volume finally gives the colophon the place it deserves. We see scribes and printers at work in Thailand, the Deccan, Delhi, Damascus, Antwerp, and Timbuktu." -Konrad Hirschler, University of Hamburg, Germany "In this cross-disciplinary endeavor, ten authors tell lively and exciting stories of historical scribal practices." -Verena Klemm, University of Leipzig, Germany This book is the first to chart the global diversity of colophons between 1400 and 1800. The volume presents a new approach to scribal cultures that expands traditional definitions. Moving from the paradigm of codicological information towards a thorough interpretation of the wider social worlds of colophons in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America, this volume uncovers the fascinating cultural history of early modern scribes. Chapters examine how those engaging in the composition and distribution of colophons shaped scribal identities, group cultures and bookish communities in a world in which manuscripts mattered. Authors build on approaches from anthropology, cultural studies, codicology, history, and philology to offer a new conceptual framework that studies colophons as scribal practices embedded in their changing social and cultural worlds. As a new contribution to the history of the book, this volume's global approach pushes the boundaries of what constitutes a colophon.