Epitomes of Dacia: Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania in Early Modern English Travelogues

Monica Matei-Chesnoiu

doi:10.18778/2083-8530.25.10

Autor

Monica Matei-Chesnoiu Ovidius University of Constanta, Romania https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9192-5513

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.25.10

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Słowa kluczowe:

early modern English geography, 'The Merchant of Venice', 'Othello', 'Pericles', Shakespeare, travelogues

Abstrakt

This essay examines the kaleidoscopic and abridged perspectives on three early modern principalities (Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania), whose lands are now part of modern-day Romania. I examine travelogues and geography texts describing these Eastern European territories written by Marco Polo (1579), Abraham Ortelius (1601; 1608), Nicolas de Nicolay (1585), Johannes Boemus (1611), Pierre d’Avity (1615), Francisco Guicciardini (1595), George Abbot (1599), Uberto Foglietta (1600), William Biddulph (1609), Richard Hakluyt (1599-1600), Fynes Moryson (1617), and Sir Henry Blount (1636), published in England in the period 1579-1636. The essay also offers brief incursions into the representations of these geographic spaces in a number of Shakespearean plays, such as The Merchant of Venice and Othello, as well as in Pericles, Prince of Tyre by Shakespeare and Wilkins. I argue that these Eastern European locations configure an erratic spatiality that conflates ancient place names with early modern ones, as they reconstruct a space-time continuum that is neither real nor totally imaginary. These territories represent real-and-fictional locations, shaping an ever-changing world of spatial networks reconstructed out of fragments of cultural geographic and ethnographic data. The travel and geographic narratives are marked by a particular kind of literariness, suggesting dissension, confusion, and political uncertainty to the early modern English imagination.

Pobrania

Brak dostępnych danych do wyświetlenia.

Biogram autora

Monica Matei-Chesnoiu - Ovidius University of Constanta, Romania

Monica Matei-Chesnoiu, PhD, DLitt, is Professor Emerita of Ovidius University of Constanta (Romania). She is the author of Geoparsing Early Modern English Drama (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Re-imagining Western European Geography in English Renaissance Drama (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Early Modern Drama and the Eastern European Elsewhere: Representations of Liminal Locality in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009), and Shakespeare in the Romanian Cultural Memory (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006). She is a Fulbright Fellow (1998-1999), Humboldt Fellow (2009-2010), and SCIEX Fellow (2013-2014). She is editor of five volumes of essays about Shakespeare in Romania (2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2016) and director of the project Shakespeare in the Romanian Cultural Memory (2005-2008). Her main interests incorporate geocriticism and spatial literary studies, including representations of space, place, and geography in Shakespeare and his contemporaries. She is member of the International Committee of Correspondents for the World Shakespeare Bibliography.

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