The Renaissance on the Road: Mobility and Change in Europe, 1450-1650 (original) (raw)

Recent research has stressed the highly mobile nature of late Medieval and Early Modern European life. All kinds of people were on the move for a huge variety of reasons, encouraged by longer-term processes such as urbanization, colonization and improvements in transport and communications infrastructures. This mobility was absolutely fundamental to the cultural, political, economic and religious changes that characterized the Renaissance period. However, there is still much to know about the practical experience – the physicality and materiality - of mobility in this period; for instance, about the spaces through which mobile people passed (which became important sites of encounter and exchange), the forms of transport they used, the physical, mental and emotional ‘baggage’ that they carried with them. How was access to and experience of mobility shaped by the traveller’s class, gender, religion and age? How did Renaissance authorities, both at city and state level, respond to this mobility, attempting to enable, harness or control it? How, exactly, did mobility facilitate communication and cultural exchange, across and beyond the continent? And how does studying people’s movements shed new light on the great changes of the period, from the transmission of Renaissance culture to Europe’s contact with the rest of the world?