This book offers new conceptual vocabularies for understanding how cultures have trespassed across geography and social space. From the transformations of the meanings and practices of charity during late antiquity and the transit of medical knowledge between early modern China and Europe, to the fusion of Irish and African dance forms in early nineteenth-century New York, the book follows a wide array of cultural practices through the lens of motion, translation, itinerancy, and exchange, extending the insights of transnational and translocal history. The book challenges the premise of fixed, stable cultural systems by showing that cultural practices have always been moving, crossing borders and locations with often surprising effect. The chapters offer striking examples from early to modern times of intrusion, translation, resistance, and adaptation. These are histories where nothing—dance rhythms, alchemical formulas, musical practices, feminist aspirations, sewing machines, streamlined metals, or labor networks—remains stationary.
Hermēneis in the Documentary Record from Hellenistic and Roman Egypt: interpreters, translators and mediators in a bilingual society