Description

• Title:
  Epitomes of Dacia: Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania in Early Modern English Travelogues
• Creator:
  Matei-Chesnoiu, Monica
• Contributor:
  Ovidius University of Constanta, Romania;
  mchesnoiu@yahoo.com
• Description:
  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.
• Object availability:
  free access
• Rights: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
• Date:
  2022.12.16;
  2022.12.14
• Type:
  Article
• Language:
  English
• Format:
  application/pdf
• Publisher:
  Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Relation:
  Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance;40;
  25
• Subject:
  early modern English geography;
  'The Merchant of Venice';
  'Othello';
  'Pericles';
  Shakespeare;
  travelogues
• Identifier:
  2083-8530;
  http://hdl.handle.net/11089/44704 ;
  2300-7605;
  10.18778/2083-8530.25.10
• Data provider:
  Repozytorium Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Can I use it?:
  check license
• Type:
  image