Introduction

The Introduction outlines the inter-penetration of literary and diplomatic cultures within European and some non-European diplomatic practices, emphasizing the wide-ranging and sophisticated ways in which early modern diplomats utilized literary motifs. It introduces readers to existing research within the emerging field of diplo-literary studies and those areas of the ‘new diplomatic history’ which are most pertinent to the core thematic focus of the collection. While situating contributions within this literature, it also outlines the collective methodological and theoretical import of the volume. Paying particular attention to literary representations of diplomacy, diplomacy, and translation, the diplomatic dissemination of texts, and the texts used in diplomatic practice, it draws out a series of findings for the field.

Ritual Practice and Textual Representations

Early modern diplomacy was never a princely and aristocratic province alone. Republics also sent and received diplomats or participated in peace conferences. Whereas this sort of republican diplomacy was basically accepted at the princely courts, Free Imperial Cities such as Bremen and Cologne faced significant difficulties when trying to gain recognition. Nonetheless, there were continuous efforts by the imperial cities to play their part in early modern diplomacy, not least because of the prestige that could be earned by participating in this sphere and its rituals. For them foreign relations were always a ritual process: ceremonial interaction was at its centre, since princely recognition of ceremonial receptions or urban emissaries conferred political and social acceptance of the imperial cities’ status. Ceremonial interaction between princes and cities often involved a reciprocal exchange of capital: of economic capital paid back as symbolic capital, as gestures of social recognition which were recorded in detail in the urban books of ceremony. Writing was therefore crucial for the symbolic dimensions of urban diplomacy. The imperial cities’ ceremony books were meant to be filled with reports about ceremony which were regarded as a gain of symbolic capital materialized in writing.

Negotiating with the Material Text

Royal letters were an integral part of early modern diplomatic communication, intended to shape inter-princely relationships through their content and their material form. The exchange of letters was a communicative mechanism on multiple, not simply textual, levels. Utilizing an interdisciplinary methodology and focusing on letters sent to and from English monarchs in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this chapter demonstrates the dynamic interactions between material text and the diplomatic conventions—ceremonial, material, visual, spatial—in which they need to be understood. Knowledge of the ceremonial context into which letters were sent shaped the considerations of how they looked and how they travelled. Although the predominant form of inter-princely letter exchanged within Europe was different from the predominant form of letters between European and non-European rulers, several of the same factors were at play. Rather than indicating a lack of cultural understanding between English diplomats and non-European princes, the epistolary practice of Elizabeth I and James VI/I suggests that many of the semiotics of power at extra-European courts were adeptly recognized by English diplomats.

Translation and Cultural Convergence in Late Sixteenth-century Scotland and Huguenot France

Examining poetical exchanges between James VI of Scotland and the Huguenot courtier Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas in the 1580s, Chapter 7 demonstrates how poetry contributed to diplomatic initiatives, and how diplomatic concerns fostered expressiveness in the composition and presentation of poems. Early modern poetry, especially poetry in translation, could contribute to building better international cultural relations. Ambassadors and elite political figures were sometimes involved in such poems as writers, translators, readers, dedicatees, or recipients. When they were, these poems could contain subtle gestures consistent with the cultural diplomatic aims to express shared identity and strengthen political ties. The poetic exchanges between James and Du Bartas in the 1580s contained many signals of the common literary and political culture in Scotland and Protestant France, signals that are found in the subject matter, prosody, diction, structure, and other poetic features of the verses that they exchanged. This chapter examines the poetic techniques that James and Du Bartas used for expressing cultural convergence between Scotland and France when translating and composing original verse for each other, and then shows how the print publication of their poems enabled a broader international community to participate in this cultural moment.

Translation and Communication

Based on a survey of how the tropes of community, commerce, and communication pervaded the rhetoric of political theory and also of certain forms of prose fiction, Chapter 5 suggests a new approach to some of the agents and networks that wove the early modern international community. It focuses in particular on works written or translated by Edward Hoby, James Mabbe, Bernardino de Mendoza, and Justus Lipsius. Its approach to these works, which is founded upon a communicative (and not merely linguistic) turn, reveals the existence of diplomatic third spaces in which ritual, symbolic, or written conventions and semantics converged, despite particular oppositions and differences. Translation, for instance, was used both to consolidate diplomatic alliances and for competitive, international self-fashioning. Translations of political treatises were communicative strategies within the general pragmatics of self-representation—and even more so in an international context dominated by conflict. Literary translation both created diplomatic communities and formed a means of articulating difference within and between those communities. As tokens of exchange between different communities, the texts that this chapter surveys helped to build up symbolic capital for self-representation vis-à-vis the originals whose materials they were appropriating, constructing a common identity (political, religious, linguistic, or otherwise) that relied on the dialectical confrontation with an ‘other’.

Lines of Amity

One of the abiding fictions underwriting the history of international law is the idea of lines of amity, the premise that territorial conflicts, acts of piracy, and other forms of extraterritorial violence that took place west of the Canaries and south of the Tropic of Cancer, did not infringe on interstate treaties or otherwise affect the amity among European states. Chapter 3 explores an alternative framework for the lines of amity, examining the ways that interstate competition in the Americas enabled unexpected alliances, forms of amity that traversed lines of nation, confessional identity, and race. Sir Francis Drake’s alliance with the nation of Cimarrons in Panama in 1572 forges modes of amity that not only traverse colony and metropole but additionally complicate the extent to which nonstate agents and stateless persons could wield political agency in the unstable political domain ‘beyond the line’. An examination of Vitoria’s De Indis reveals the means through which the lines of amity remained entrenched in the European political imagination, a transformation accomplished through a narrative strategy that relegated colonial history to its own tragic register. Vitoria transforms amity from a model of similitude and alliance to a defence of Spanish colonialism under the guise of diplomacy, free trade, and the defence of the innocent. Finally, Davenent’s The History of Sir Francis Drake rewrites Drake’s alliance with the Cimarrons in order to provide a spectacular precedent for representing England’s nascent imperial identity, ensured through entrance into the Spanish Caribbean.

The Place of the Literary in European Diplomacy

Chapter 1 uses myth and myth-ritual theory to make sense of previously unstudied myths about the shared origins of diplomacy and literature in English, French, Spanish, and Italian diplomatic handbooks. Such diplomatic theorists as Alberico Gentili, Juan Antonio de Vera y Figueroa, Gasparo Bragaccia, and James Howell adapted classical myths and biblical stories to link the establishment of diplomatic institutions with the emergence of the literary arts. Set against a mythical time of pre-civilized anarchy, their origin accounts imply that without the rhetorical and poetic abilities believed necessary both to create literature and to negotiate successfully, international relations would break down, and anarchy prevail once more. These myths expose beliefs about the foundational relationship between diplomacy and literature prevalent within the European political elites that produced and consumed them. This chapter argues that, as powerful, community-wide narratives, the handbooks’ fictional histories naturalized the use of literary products and the display of literary skills—such as oratory, theatricality, wit, and poetic sensibility—within the diplomatic rituals of early modern Europe.

Diplomatic Writing as Aristocratic Self-Fashioning

Taking French ambassadorial reports from the reign of Louis XIV as an example, this chapter argues that in their letters to their superiors, French ambassadors expressed themselves not primarily as professional diplomats, but as eminent members of French court society and potential aspirants to even higher charges and honours. First and foremost, early modern diplomats abided by the ethos of patronage. Far from home, the ambassador still obeyed the social logic of court factions, clientele networks, and competition for prestige. His letters had to compensate for his physical absence from Versailles, as his only currency in the French court society’s economy of honour. The ambassador therefore used his letters as a specific means of displaying his skills and abilities, and distinguishing and expressing himself. He could fashion himself as honnête homme, noble warrior, or pious man of letters—or whatever aristocratic virtue seemed appropriate. In this sense, his letters were genuine self-narratives, and diplomatic history could therefore benefit greatly from methods and concepts elaborated in the dynamic research field of early modern ego-documents. By understanding diplomatic writing as noble self-fashioning and analysing diplomatic correspondence as self-narratives, this chapter reassesses the proper role and specific functioning of diplomacy in early modern political culture.

Textual Ambassadors and Ambassadorial Texts

Juxtaposing the diplomatic correspondence of Thomas Randolph’s 1568–9 mission to Russia with George Turberville’s literary account of the embassy, this chapter combines an exploration of diplomatic practice as a transcultural process with a methodological reflection on the relationship between the textual representation of cultural encounter and its interpretation in the history of diplomacy. The historiography of diplomacy is enmeshed with the cultural discourses that are woven into its source materials. Based on a genre critique of texts that have informed the history of Russian diplomacy, such as travel accounts and diplomatic reports, this essay questions central assumptions about Russia’s image as Europe’s cultural other, offering wider conclusions about the notion of separate cultural spheres and their corresponding political ideologies in the evolution of diplomacy. Clearly, Russian diplomats viewed the world differently from English representatives. But a closer look at Anglo-Russian encounters in the second half of the sixteenth century raises doubts as to whether these worldviews separated them quite so distinctively in matters concerning their ceremonial self-representation. A close reading and comparison of Randolph’s and Turberville’s texts shows how difficult it is to translate pre-conceived notions about cultural difference into each culture’s distinctive symbols of sovereignty and statehood.

Distinguished Visitors

Chapter 2 begins with the Turkish ambassador’s visit to the ambitious but foolish bourgeois Monsieur Jourdain in Molière’s 1670 play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, triggering both its denouement and a generic shift from comedic drama to musical ballet. The readings of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII and Calderón’s Constant Prince that follow explore the intersection between the plot motif in which a domestic location or closed space is intruded upon by a diplomatic figure, and the generic multiplicity of early modern drama. It argues that such spatial and generic transitions mediate the tension between domestic, national, and international spaces posed by an increasingly international political culture. Dramatic texts register the intrusiveness of the diplomatic outsider through moments of generic multiplicity, where pastoral interrupts historical tragedy or where Moorish romance intersects with the literature of martyrdom. Drama continually asks us to reflect on the constitution of space, and of who is ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ of a particular community. When established spatial and generic boundaries are transgressed those politics are especially legible: at the centre of European dramatic literature is a confrontational politics worked out at the level of form. Finally the chapter examines the modern novel, in which early modern tensions between international and national political spaces are reworked as a contrast between some larger political world and the discrete private space of the home. For Proust, the nostalgia-laden figure of the diplomat brings into that private space from his early modern past the very possibility of literature.