“Mobility, Materiality, Philology: Collecting the East in the West” Lecture by Roberta Ricci (Bryn Mawr)

“Mobility, Materiality, Philology: Collecting the East in the West”

By scrutinizing paradigmatic ingredients found in travelogues (diaries, epistolary accounts, chronicles, poetry en route) across multiple chronological registers, from and into Byzantium and neighboring lands, this presentation looks at the complexity of the literary imagination elaborated by Italian authors (transmigrantes) on the greatness of Byzantium and, what is more, on the presence of the Greek East within the Latin West adhering to a long-established auctoritas.

To better address this interplay, or collision, I explore mobility within Mediterranean dynamics, encounters, and entanglements, focusing on transculturality that stems from migration of portabilia, memorabilia, instrumentaria, exotica, spolia, devotionalia, mirabilia and objects of everyday life from the Orient. How and to what extent did multiple agents, phenomena, and factors interact to shape and intertwine the multidimensional spheres of Constantinople as a learning destination in and across the Mediterranean? This presentation addresses the transcultural implications of a 17^th-century Italian travel writing, broadly understood as a narrative that acknowledges mobility as a means of mediation, transmission, and translation of culture. Here I present the case study of Pietro Della Valle’s Viaggi (1614) at a crossroad of languages and civilizations, philology and materiality.

Lecture sponsored by the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics and the Medieval Renaissance Program