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Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary
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Tracey A. Sowerby
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C U LT U R E S O F D I P L O M A C Y A N D L I T E R A RY
W R I T I N G I N T H E E A R LY M O D E R N WO R L D
Cultures of Diplomacy
and Literary Writing
in the Early
Modern World
Edited by
T R A C E Y A . S OW E R B Y A N D
J OA N N A C R A I G WO O D
1
1
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Acknowledgements
This volume originates from an international research network, ‘Textual

Ambassadors: Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern
World’ that was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant no.
AH/K001930/1). None of this would have been possible without its support. The
essays presented here were written predominantly, but not exclusively, by members
of the network. Other members have contributed essays to different publications
arising from the project but have contributed to the content of this volume through
our discussions over the years. We are grateful to all of them for their insights.
Our especial thanks go to Joad Raymond and John Watkins who have selflessly
shared their experience and wisdom as members of our steering committee. We are
also grateful to Keble College, Oxford; The Oxford Research Centre for the
Humanities; and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge for their support of the network’s
events. The inclusion of images in Chapter 13 was made possible by a grant from
the Scouloudi Foundation in association with the Institute of Historical Research.
The contributors would like to thank the staff at all of the libraries and archives
listed in our Bibliography for their assistance over the years.
Contents
List of Figures ix
List of Abbreviations xi
Notes on Contributors xiii
Introduction: Literary and Diplomatic Cultures in the

Early Modern World 1
Tracey A. Sowerby and Joanna Craigwood
I . L I T E R A RY E N G A G E M E N T S
1. The Place of the Literary in European Diplomacy: Origin Myths
in Ambassadorial Handbooks 25
Joanna Craigwood
2. Distinguished Visitors: Literary Genre and Diplomatic
Space in Shakespeare, Calderón, and Proust 41
Timothy Hampton
3. Lines of Amity: The Law of Nations in the Americas 54
Mark Netzloff
4. Diplomatic Pathos: Sidney’s Brazen Fictions and the
Troubled Origins of International Law 69
John Watkins
I I . T R A N S L AT I O N
5. Translation and Communication: War and Peace
by Other Means 87
José María Pérez Fernández
6. The Politics of Translation: The Lusiads and
European Diplomacy (1580–1664) 101
Catarina Fouto
7. Translation and Cultural Convergence in Late
Sixteenth-century Scotland and Huguenot France 115
Peter Auger
I I I . D I S S E M I N AT I O N
8. Books as Diplomatic Agents: Milton in Sweden 131
Joad Raymond
viii Contents
9. Diplomatic Knowledge on Display: Foreign Affairs in the

Early Modern English Public Sphere 146
András Kiséry
10. A Diplomatic Narrative in the Archive: The War of Cyprus,
Record Keeping Practices, and Historical Research in the
Early Modern Venetian Chancery 160
Fabio Antonini
I V. D I P L O M AT I C D O C U M E N T S
11. Textual Ambassadors and Ambassadorial Texts: Literary
Representation and Diplomatic Practice in George
Turberville’s and Thomas Randolph’s Accounts of Russia (1568–9) 175
Jan Hennings
12. Diplomatic Writing as Aristocratic Self-Fashioning:
French Ambassadors in Constantinople 190
Christine Vogel
13. Negotiating with the Material Text: Royal Correspondence
between England and the Wider World 203
Tracey A. Sowerby
14. Ritual Practice and Textual Representations: Free Imperial
Cities in the Society of Princes 220
André J. Krischer
Bibliography 239
Index 271
List of Figures
13.1 James VI/I to Sultan Ahmed I, 17 January 1617 206

13.2 Elizabeth I to the Emperor of Cathay, 4 May 1602 215
13.3 James VI/I to the Emperor of Japan, 11 April 1614 216
14.1 Map with places mentioned in Chapter 14 221
14.2 Title leaf of one of the Cologne books of ceremonies (1740–97) 226
14.3 Letter of Duke Augustus to the council of Braunschweig, 1627 228
14.4 Title page of a so-called ‘Aufwartungsbuch’ (‘book of courtesies’)
of Schwäbisch Hall 230
14.5 Cologne book of ceremonies (1740–97), fos. 88v–89r 232
14.6 Bremen by Matthaeus Merian, c.1641235
List of Abbreviations
BL British Library
CSPF Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth, ed. Joseph
Stevenson, Arthur J. Butler and Sophia C. Lomas, 23 vols (London,
1863–1950)
EHR English Historical Review
HJ The Historical Journal
JEMH Journal of Early Modern History
JMEMS Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
JMH Journal of Modern History
LP Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. John
Sherren Brewer, James Gairdner, and Robert Henry Brodie, 23 vols (London,
1862–1932)
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004; online edn, October
2008)
P&P Past & Present
RBK Lloyd E. Berry and Robert O. Crummey (eds), Rude and Barbarous Kingdom:
Russia in the Accounts of Sixteenth-century English Voyagers (Madison, 1968)
RR Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme
StP Studies in Philology
TNA The National Archives
ZHF Zeitschrift für historische Forschung
Notes on Contributors
Fabio Antonini completed his doctoral research as a member of the ERC-funded research
group ‘ARCHIves—A Comparative History of Archives in Late Medieval and Early
Modern Italy’ at Birkbeck College, University of London. His research concerns the
relationship between archival practice and the writing of history in early modern Venice,
the development of the archive as a locus for historical research, and the role of information
networks in the formation and defence of civic historical identities.
Peter Auger is Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at the University of Birmingham, having
previously held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Queen Mary University of
London. His various shorter pieces on Du Bartas’ reception history support the arguments
made in Du Bartas’ Legacy in England and Scotland, which is forthcoming with Oxford
University Press. His current research is on Franco-British poetic relations during James VI
and I’s reign and multilingual literary practices.
Joanna Craigwood (University of Cambridge) works on the relationship between English
literature and diplomacy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She has published variously
on the diplomatic contexts for literary theory, Sidney, and Shakespeare, and on diplomats as
book collectors. She was co-investigator on the AHRC-funded international network ‘Textual
Ambassadors: Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World’ and
has given invited talks on literature and diplomacy in Europe and the US.
Catarina Fouto is Lecturer in Portuguese Studies at King’s College London. She has
published on Portuguese vernacular and Neo-Latin literature and the culture of the early
modern period. Her interests include the history of the book and censorship, the history of
literary theory, translation studies, and the reception of classical and medieval literature in
the early-modern period. Catarina is a member of the international research group
Seminario de Poética Europea del Renacimiento (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), a
member of the editorial board of the journal Portuguese Studies and serves on the Committee
of the Centre for Early Modern Studies (CEMS) at King’s College London.
Timothy Hampton is Professor of Comparative Literature and French at the University of
California at Berkeley, where he also directs the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the
Humanities. He is the author of Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early
Modern Europe (Ithaca, 2010). His other books include Literature and Nation in the
Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France (Ithaca, 2001) and Writing from History: the
Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, 1990).
Jan Hennings is Associate Professor of History at Central European University, Budapest.
His research has focused on early modern diplomacy, especially in Russian-European
contexts. His current work explores Russian-Ottoman exchanges, concentrating on the
establishment of the first Russian resident embassy in Constantinople at the beginning of
the eighteenth century. Before moving to Budapest, he had held a Junior Research
Fellowship at St John’s College Oxford, and taught history as a Visiting Professor and Gerda
Henkel Fellow at Sabancı University, Istanbul. His publications include Russia and Courtly
Europe: Ritual and the Culture of Diplomacy, 1648–1725 (Cambridge, 2016), and he is a
co-editor (with Tracey A. Sowerby) of Practices of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World
c.1410–1800 (London, 2017).
xiv Notes on Contributors

András Kiséry is Associate Professor of English at The City College of New York (CUNY).
He has written about early modern English literature, political culture, and the material text,
as well as about early twentieth-century German and Hungarian scholarship on the history
of communication. He is author of Hamlet’s Moment: Drama and Political Knowledge in
Early Modern England (Oxford, 2016) and co-editor of Formal Matters: Reading the
Materials of English Renaissance Literature (Manchester, 2013), and Worlds of Hungarian
Writing: National Literature as Intercultural Exchange (Madison, 2016). He is now working
on two longer projects, about early modern English literature and the European book trade,
and about the birth of media studies in early twentieth-century century sociology, history,
and philology.
André J. Krischer studied history, philosophy and English literature in Cologne and Bonn.
André is a Lecturer in British history at the University of Muenster, Germany, where he is
also a Principal Investigator in the DFG-Collaborativ Research Centre ‘Cultures of Decision
Making’ (SFB 1150). He is interested in the cultural history of diplomacy and foreign
relations in the early modern world, the visual history of religious violence, the history of
bureaucratic and parliamentary procedures of decision making, and the history of political
crime. He has recently published a book on treason and treason trials in England from the
sixteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century.
Mark Netzloff is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is the
author of England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern
English Colonialism (New York, 2003), the editor of John Norden’s The Surveyor’s Dialogue:
A Critical Edition (Farnham, 2010), and the co-editor of Early Modern Drama in
Performance: Essays in Honor of Lois Potter (2017). He recently completed a book, Writing
Beyond the State: English Travelers, Soldiers, and Diplomats in Early Modern Europe, which is
forthcoming with OUP.
José María Pérez Fernández teaches at the University of Granada. He works on the relations
between translation, diplomacy, and the book trade, their role in the construction of the
international republic of letters, and the early modern idea of Europe. He is particularly
interested in general processes of communication and how financial and mercantile activity
mirrored the ways in which these exchanges took place. During a recent tenure as Berenson
Fellow (2017) at Villa I Tatti he worked on a monograph (with Edward Wilson-Lee), on
Hernando Colón’s library (forthcoming with Yale UP in 2019). He is currently working on
a new book titled Communication, Community, and Commerce.
Joad Raymond was born and schooled in Cardiff, and found his way to Queen Mary
University of London via UEA, Oxford, and Aberdeen. He is the author and editor of
numerous books on the history of news, cheap print, Milton, and angels, most recently,
with Noah Moxham, News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2016). He has just
completed a two-volume edition of Milton’s Latin defences for OUP, and is writing a book
on the history of news communication for Penguin. He is also engaged in various projects
in the creative arts.
Tracey A. Sowerby (University of Oxford) researches early modern political culture and
religion, with a particular focus on diplomatic practices and cultures. She was principal
investigator on two diplomacy-related projects ‘Textual Ambassadors: Cultures of
Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World’, funded by the AHRC and
‘Centres of Diplomacy, Centres of Culture’ funded by the British Academy. She is the
author of Renaissance and Reform in Tudor England: the Careers of Sir Richard Morison
Notes on Contributors xv
c.1513–1556 (Oxford, 2010) and is co-editor, with Jan Hennings, of Practices of Diplomacy
in the Early Modern World c.1410–1800 (London, 2017).
Christine Vogel is Professor of European History (seventeenth–nineteenth centuries) at the
University of Vechta (Germany). Formerly she was a research assistant at the University of
Rostock and an associate member of the GRC-Research Group ‘Self-Narratives in
Transcultural Perspective’ at the Freie Universität Berlin. She was awarded a Feodor-Lynen
Fellowship by the Humboldt Foundation and was a visiting fellow at the Université Paris
IV-Sorbonne in 2009–10. She is the author of Der Untergang der Gesellschaft Jesu als
europäisches Medienereignis: publizistische Debatten im Spannungsfeld von Aufklärung und
Gegenaufklärung (Mainz, 2006), and co-editor with Peter Burschel of Die Audienz:
ritualisierter Kulturkontakt in der Frühen Neuzeit (Cologne, 2014), and, with Claudia
Garnier, of Interkulturelle Ritualpraxis in der Vormoderne: diplomatische Interaktion an den
östlichen Grenzen der Fürstengesellschaft (Berlin, 2016).
John Watkins is Distinguished McKnight University Professor of English at the University
of Minnesota. His research focuses on sovereignty; cultural and diplomatic exchanges
between England, France, and the Mediterranean; and the classical and medieval
underpinnings of early modernity. His books include The Specter of Dido (New Haven,
1995); Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England (Cambridge, 2002); After Lavinia: A
Literary History of Premodern Marriage Diplomacy (Ithaca, 2017); and with Carole Levin,
Shakespeare’s Foreign Worlds: National and Transnational Identity in the Elizabethan Age
(London, 2009). With Kathryn L. Reyerson, he is the co-editor of Mediterranean Identities
in the Premodern Era: Entrepôts, Islands, Empires (Farnham, 2014).
Introduction
Literary and Diplomatic Cultures
in the Early Modern World
Tracey A. Sowerby and Joanna Craigwood
L I T E R A RY - D I P L O M AT I C C U LT U R E
To Renaissance writers the close relationship between literature and diplomacy was
self-evident. So much so that the Italian exile and professor of civil law Alberico
Gentili devoted a chapter of his magnum opus on embassies to a discussion of ambas-
sadors of literary attainments. Recognizing that a large number of distinguished
litterateurs from every field of learning had undertaken diplomatic missions, his
list included eminent theologians, philosophers, and jurists. Many were ancient
authors such as Aristotle, Cicero, and Diogenes, but several, including Ermolao
Barbaro, Guillaume Budé, and Francesco Guicciardini, were Gentili’s near contem-
poraries.1 Gentili could easily have added many names to his list for a significant
number of early modern European diplomats were writers including some of the
foremost political, legal, and literary authors of the European Renaissance, men
such as Niccolò Machiavelli, Bernardino de Mendoza, and Thomas Wyatt. This
emphasis on the literary accomplishments of early modern ambassadors should
come as no surprise: high among the skills early modern diplomats needed were
oratory and eloquence and much of an ambassador’s work was textual—writing
reports, composing speeches, writing letters.2
Indeed, for Gentili, as for so many humanists, literary writing and political ser-
vice were not mutually exclusive spheres of activity, but could be meaningfully
interwoven. He believed that the attention of ambassadors ‘can always be brought
to the responsibilities of public life, especially if their literary activities are not widely
divorced from those responsibilities’ and that an ambassador’s literary education
should ideally be directed towards serving the common good. Gentili wanted
well-educated ambassadors whose literary studies would bear on ‘practical politics
1 Alberico Gentili, De legationibus libri tres, ed. Gordon J. Laing, 2 vols (New York, 1924),
II.159–61.
2 See for example Douglas Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in
Renaissance Italy (Chicago, IL, 2002), chs. 4–5; Isabella Lazzarini, Communication and Conflict: Italian
Diplomacy in the Early Renaissance, 1350–1620 (Oxford, 2015), esp. parts II and IV.
2 Tracey A. Sowerby and Joanna Craigwood
and [. . .] the administration of high offices’.3 The authors of other diplomatic

handbooks also made this association. Ottaviano Maggi outlined an extensive list
of subjects and authors that an ambassador should read, including literary texts, in
preparation for diplomatic service.4
The links between literature and diplomacy went much deeper. Many diplomatic
commentators and theorists found that literary tropes provided a language that
helped them to make sense of diplomacy itself. For the French civil lawyer and
occasional diplomat Jean Hotman distinguishing between ‘An Ambassage and a
Comedie’ provided a useful way to explain the singular representational identity
required of an ambassador, for during an embassy ‘a man cannot [. . .] play diuerse
partes vnder diuers garments’ without risking both his and his master’s honour.5
One century later, Abraham de Wicquefort also considered the relationship
between comedy and diplomacy. With a hint of satire, he recommended that an
ambassador ‘ought to have the Tincture of the Comedian’ for ‘there is not a more
illustrious Theatre than a Court; neither is there any Comedy, where the Actors
seem less what they are in effect, than Embassadors do in their Negotiation’.6
Whereas for Hotman parallels with the stage highlighted the need for straight
dealing, at least as far as it concerned only taking on one mission for one master at a
time, for Wicquefort they suggested the highly performative, dissimulative practices
of contemporary diplomacy.
The use of a literary vocabulary when trying to comprehend diplomatic activity
was not limited to the—admittedly numerous—diplomatic manuals produced in
early modern Europe.7 A wide range of European diplomats found that literary
tropes provided a useful repertoire with which to describe and analyse the per-
formative political cultures they encountered at foreign courts. For instance Sir
Thomas Roe reported of the court of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir that ‘this
sitting out hath soe much affinitye with a theatre—the manner of the king in his
gallery; the great men lifted on a stage as actors; the vulgar below gazing on—that
an easy description will informe of the place and fashion’.8 Deploying the analogy
to London public theatres helped Roe to explain the hierarchical use of space
within Mughal court ceremony.9 On other occasions employing theatrical tropes
permitted Roe to downplay the political significance of his acceptance of robes of
honour from the Mughal Emperor, commenting that the cloak would have suited
an actor playing Tamerlane, or to denigrate his political rivals, such as the Persian
3 Gentili, De legationibus, II. 159–61.

4 Ottaviano Maggi, De legato libri duo (Venice, 1566), Book II, esp. 55–7.
5 Jean Hotman, The Ambassador (London, 1603), F7v.
6 Abraham de Wicquefort, The embassador and his functions, trans. J. Digby (London, 1716), 294.
7 For a survey of the handbooks see Catherine Fletcher, Diplomacy in Renaissance Rome: the Rise of
the Resident Ambassador (Cambridge, 2015), 38–42; H. Kugeler, ‘ “Le parfait ambassadeur”. The
Theory and Practice of Diplomacy in the Century Following the Peace of Westphalia’, D.Phil. thesis
University of Oxford (2006).
8 The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, 1615–19: as Narrated in his Journal
and Correspondence, ed. William Foster (London, 1899), 87.
9 On Mughal ceremonial see Stephen P. Blake, Time in Early Modern Islam: Calendar, Ceremony
and Chronology in the Safavid, Mughal and Ottoman Empires (Cambridge, 2013).
Literary and Diplomatic Cultures 3
ambassador, whom he described as ‘rather a Iester or Iugler then a Person of any

gravety, running vp and downe, and acting all his woordes like a mimick Player’.10
Roe’s links to English dramatists11 go some way towards explaining his choice of
strategy, but other European diplomats, without comparable connections, invoked
similar parallels too.
Many ambassadors found a descriptive vocabulary for diplomacy that was drawn
from literature and drama useful because they perceived close resonances between
the representational and performative nature of the two activities, resonances that
helped them to understand the cultural relativism at play between their host and
their home courts. Ogier de Busbecq, the Imperial ambassador to Sultan Suleiman I
in 1555, likened his own actions as ambassador to acting and used the genre he
invoked to add further layers of meaning, writing that he processed to take leave of
the Sultan after his failure to secure a permanent peace between the Emperor and
the Ottomans ‘as though I were going to play the part of Agamemnon or some
similar hero in a tragedy’.12 On the surface Roe and Busbecq’s adoption of a dramatic
framework for their analyses may appear to be inflected by exoticism, the reaction
of an ambassador to the unfamiliar phenomena he encountered in a polity with a
far different normative system.13 However, such analogies are also frequently found
within intra-European diplomatic discourse, and dated back to the use of actors as
diplomats among ancient Greek city-states, as early modern commentators knew.14
These references even extended to using the plots of plays as an analytical short hand.
Hence Christopher Mundt could liken the actions of Otto Truchess von Waldburg,
Cardinal of Augsburg, to those of Davus in Andria.15 Despite shifts in the attitudes
with which contemporary commentators and political actors approached diplomacy,
literary and dramatic tropes remained a useful conceptual tool for making sense of
the processes and practices of inter-princely and interstate relations throughout the
early modern period. From the hermeneutic manipulation of proto-novelistic nar-
rative to make sense of a sixteenth-century Portuguese-Vijayanagar encounter to
the late-seventeenth-century employment of the emerging literary-aesthetic term
‘genius’ to describe diplomatic wit, diplomatic discourses drew on evolving literary
references, genres, and values.16
10 Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 300, 334.

11 On Roe’s possible links to English poets and dramatists see Colin Mitchell, Sir Thomas Roe and
the Mughal Empire (Karachi, 2000), 55–9.
12 The Turkish Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, Imperial Ambassador at Constantinople, 1554–
1562, ed. Edward S. Forster (Oxford, 1927), 64.
13 For this interpretation see Jyotsna G. Singh, Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: ‘Discoveries’
of India in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1996), 19–51.
14 Pat Easterling and Edith Hall (eds), Greek and Roman Actors: Aspects of an Ancient Profession
(Cambridge, 2002), 332–3. For knowledge of this ancient practice see An Apology For Actors (London,
1612), C2v–C3r.
15 TNA SP 70/5, fo. 126v [CSPF I 977].
16 Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski, ‘The Queen of Onor and her Emissaries: Fernão Mendes
Pinto’s Dialogue with India’, in Brinda Charry and Gitanjali Shahani (eds), Emissaries in Early Modern
Literature and Culture: Mediation, Transmission, Traffic, 1550–1700 (Farnham, 2009), 167–91 (168–79);
London Metropolitan Archives, ACC/0510, Matthew Prior to the Earl of Jersey, July 8/18, 1699.
One reason for the use of literary parallels in diplomatic descriptions was
undoubtedly the increasing preponderance of literary men among those serving
their princes abroad from the fifteenth century. Indeed, the careers of Renaissance
diplomats bear out Gentili’s confidence that literature and diplomacy were compat-
ible, even complementary, as so many were renowned poets, dramatists, translators,
and polemicists. Others were influential literary patrons and many moved within
literary circles. Diplomats’ minds also no doubt turned to literary parallels so regularly
for the simple reason that literary composition was embedded within diplomatic
culture in many parts of the early modern world. A brief examination of the uses
of poetry within diplomatic practice highlights just how integral literary compos-
ition and texts were. In the areas once dominated by classical Chinese, poetry that
drew upon a shared logographic system frequently paralleled the official negotiations
and provided a means of commenting upon them.17 Korean envoys to China were
sometimes tasked with composing poems as part of their missions, while by the end
of the eighteenth century, poetry was still sufficiently closely linked to Chinese dip-
lomacy that the Quianlong Emperor personally composed a poem to celebrate
George McCartney’s embassy.18 Poems were exchanged within and alongside letters
between princes in Islamicate Eurasia, while European queens might send poems
to one another as gifts.19 Poems were written to celebrate important and unusual
diplomatic gifts: the giraffes that al-Mu’izz of Tunis and Lorenzo de Medici received
from the Mamluk sultans were celebrated in verse.20 Meanwhile polemical verse could
continue hostilities in the absence of open war.21 As several of the essays in this
volume suggest, the prestige attached to poetry made it a useful vehicle for building
cultural capital and, thereby, diplomatic benefit.
Another reason was the centrality of humanist rhetorical culture to the develop-
ment of both European diplomacy and literature during this period.22 Scholars
have long known that early modern Europe adopted the Roman practice of referring
to ambassadors as orators, and that they were accordingly expected to be eloquent.23
Humanist rhetoric—the art of speaking and writing well and persuasively informed
by the studia humanitatis or the study of grammar, poetry, history, rhetoric, and
moral philosophy—influenced developments in Italian diplomacy.24 Humanist
oratorical displays served as cultural gifts between Italian city-states in ritual
17 For example Liam C. Kelley, Beyond the Bronze Pillars: Envoy Poetry and the Sino-Vietnamese
Relationship (Honolulu, 2005).
18 Dane Alston, ‘Empire and Emissary: the Hongwu Emperor, Kwŏn Kŭn, and the Poetry of Late
Fourteenth-Century Diplomacy’, Korean Studies, 32 (2008), 104–47.
19 Cihan Yüksel Muslu, The Ottomans and the Mamluks: Imperial Diplomacy and Warfare in the
Islamic World (London, 2014), 36, 333n.22; Peter C. Herman, Royal Poetrie: Monarchic Verse and the
Political Imaginary of Early Modern England (Ithaca, 2010), 68–71.
20 Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Practising Diplomacy in the Mamluk Sultanate: Gifts and Material
Culture in the Medieval Islamic world (London, 2014), 113, 141–2.
21 David Carlson, ‘Politicizing Tudor Court Literature: Gaguin’s Embassy and Henry VII’s Humanists’
Response’, StP, 85 (1988), 279–304.
22 Timothy Hampton, Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe
(Ithaca, 2009), 14–44.
23 Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (Harmondsworth, 1955), 186; Donald E. Queller,
The Office of Ambassador in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1967), 60–76; for example Hotman,
Ambassador, C2v: ‘in many places Ambassadors are called Orators’.
24 Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries, 16, 101–52.
performances bound up with diplomatic honour and shame.25 The humanist

absorption of a classical cultural heritage characterized by shared stories, Ciceronian
rhetoric, and linguistic and syntactical borrowings from Latin created the cultural
connections and common political language that allowed first Italian and then wider
European diplomats to negotiate fragmented political geographies.26 By the late
sixteenth century, northern European writers were already parodying the established
diplomatic exploitation of classical rhetoric and literature.27
Humanist oratory became such a powerful part of European diplomatic ritual
that early voyagers to North America drew on it as an interpretative framework for
understanding rituals of encounter among indigenous societies.28 Captain John
Smith describes the leader Powhatan as greeting him with ‘a great Oration made by
three of his Nobles’ on his arrival in what would become Virginia as ‘a publike
confirmation of a perpetuall league and friendship’.29 Despite his ultimate inability
to understand or adequately convey indigenous speech, which he reframes within
classical humanist reference sets, Smith’s accounts do also show that stylized oratorical
performances were integral to Powhatan diplomatic ceremony: ‘if any great com-
mander arrive’, Smith recounts, ‘2. or more of their chiefest men make an oration,
testifying their love. Which they do with such vehemency and so great passions,
that they sweate till they drop, and are so out of breath they can scarce speake.’30
Likewise when the Portuguese chronicler Rui de Pina praises Prince Jelen of
Senegambia for his oratory on a visit to King John II in Lisbon, his words may reflect
the fictional imposition of humanist expectations on this written account, but they
may also reflect the skilful negotiation of European rhetorical ritual by the African
prince.31 After all, as the Italian diplomat Gaspare Bragaccia pointed out in 1626,
the ambassador ‘must possess practised eloquence to know how to persuade in both
speech and writing’ making him in essence a ‘man of language’.32
D I P L O - L I T E R A RY S T U D I E S A N D T H E
N E W D I P L O M AT I C H I S TO RY
As the web of diplomatic discourse informed by humanist intellectual culture

engaged with many of the same concerns as early modern literature, current schol-
arship is increasingly recognizing the importance of understanding the dialogue
25 Brian Jeffrey Maxson, The Humanist World of Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, 2014), 85–106.
26 Lazzarini, Communication and Conflict, 7.
27 Warren Boutcher, ‘ “Who taught thee Rhetoricke to deceive a maid?”: Christopher Marlowe’s
Hero and Leander, Juan Boscán’s Leandro, and Renaissance Vernacular Humanism’, Comparative
Literature 52 (2000), 11–52 (45–9).
28 Sandra M. Gustafson, Eloquence is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel
Hill, NC, 2000), 5–8.
29 John Smith, A True relation of such occurrences and accidents of note, as hath hapned in Virginia
(1608), in Philip Barbour (ed.), The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, 1580–1631, 3 vols (Chapel
Hill, NC, 1986), I.65.
30 Smith, A Map of Virginia (1612), in Barbour (ed.), Complete Works, I.167–8.
31 Rui de Pina, Crónica de El-Rei D. João II, ed. Alberto Martins de Carvalho (Coimbra, 1950), 92.
For an assessment of Pina’s account see Ivana Elbl, ‘Cross-cultural Trade and Diplomacy: Portuguese
Relations with West Africa, 1441–1521’, Journal of World History, 3 (1992), 188–92.
32 Gaspare Bragaccia, L’Ambasciatore (Padua, 1626), 123.
between these spheres.33 Timothy Hampton first compellingly demonstrated the

powerful symbiotic relationship between the overlapping diplomatic and literary
cultures of early modern Europe. Diplomatic culture was semiotic and symbolic in
nature, invested in the production of signs, shaped by practices of communication,
interpretation and linguistic exchange, and plagued by problems of reading and
writing. That was both why literary skills, tools, and comparisons were so useful
to diplomacy and why literary texts provided so powerful a lens through which to
read and reflect upon diplomatic practices.34 The depiction of diplomatic activity
within literary texts—Hampton’s ‘diplomatic moment’—in turn allowed writers to
reflect on their own analogous ability to represent, on their semiotic practices and
limitations, and on the genre conventions that framed and controlled such multi-
layered scenes of negotiation.35 Hampton has shown how responses to the new
practices and discourses of diplomacy that emerged as Europe increasingly adopted
resident embassies shaped the evolution of three major genres—the essay, epic, and
tragedy.36 His Fictions of Embassy inspired widespread interest in what he has called
a ‘diplomatic poetics’: a way of reading literature that acknowledges its role in
negotiating relationships between polities and a way of reading diplomacy that takes
into account its fictional and linguistic dimensions.37
Hampton’s emphasis on the links between humanism and diplomatic culture
and his interest in the changing techniques and structures of representation that
eventually lead to resident diplomacy might seem to imply that the literary-
diplomatic synergy was unique to European Renaissance culture. While there was
undoubtedly something distinctive about the literary impetus within the diplo-
matic cultures of European princes and the diplomatic impulses within Renaissance
literature, a close relationship between diplomacy and literature also existed in
many other parts of the world. At the most basic level the use of skilled writers
within diplomacy was not an exclusively European phenomenon. As research on
other areas has established, many non-European societies valued literary accom-
plishments in diplomatic circles and believed them advantageous to diplomacy.
Scholars frequently served alongside military men as envoys in Ottoman-Mamluk
diplomacy.38 Literary skill in Persian and Arabic was prized in many parts of Asia,
while Islamic princes used allusions from a shared literary tradition when writing
to each other.39 It is important to acknowledge the dynamics of diplo-literary
culture in other parts of the globe. Yet no volume can be comprehensive in its
geographic coverage and this volume is no exception. Some parts of the world have
left insufficient written sources from this period to permit analysis of the links
between their literary and diplomatic cultures; and there is a relative paucity of entirely
extra-European research into literary-diplomatic relations within Anglophone
33 Hampton, Fictions of Embassy, 12. 34 Ibid., 6–72.

35 Ibid.; Timothy Hampton, ‘The Diplomatic Moment: Representing Negotiation in Early
Modern Europe’, Modern Language Quarterly, 67 (2006), 81–102 (82).
36 Hampton, Fictions of Embassy, passim, but see 6–7 on diplomatic genres. 37 Ibid., 2.
38 Muslu, Ottomans and the Mamluks, 27, 73–4, 157.
39 For example Colin Mitchell, ‘Safavid Imperial tarassul and the Persian inshā’ Tradition’, Studia
Iranica, 26 (1997), 173–209.
academia. Instead, this collection invites readers to make comparisons between

literary-diplomatic cultures in different parts of the early modern world by incorpor-
ating several essays that examine the relationship between literature and diplomacy
in missions beyond Europe. In doing so, it aims to question the exceptionality of
the relationship between Renaissance humanism and literature and to encourage
future research into other regions.
Over the last decade literary critical interest in diplomacy has built broadly
alongside and in response to Hampton’s diplomatic poetics. Scholars have exam-
ined performances of plays, masques, and rituals before ambassadors, as well as the
(sometimes controversial) consumption of diplomatic affairs through public stage-
plays, with an eye to the analogies between theatrical and diplomatic performance
discussed above.40 They have started to reconstruct the relationship between dip-
lomatic service and the composition of poetry through instances in which the
cross-cultural exposure of embassies influenced national poetic traditions, diplomatic
agendas and sources shed new light on poems, and poetic form and expression helped
negotiate diplomatic difficulties.41 They have started to scrutinize sermons serving
diplomatic agendas, the composition and circulation of polemical prose and news
for diplomatic ends, and the use of narrative and rhetorical techniques and anecdotes
from history, biography, and prose fiction to make sense of diplomatic events.42
Finally, they have begun to bring a literary toolkit to bear on diplomatic documents
and activities, highlighting the aesthetic, formal, rhetorical, fictional, narrative, and
material qualities of diplomatic writing and thought.43 At their best, these recent
40 For example András Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment: Drama and Political Knowledge in Early Modern
England (Oxford, 2016), ch. 2; Nathalie Rivère de Carles (ed.), Early Modern Diplomacy, Theatre and
Soft Power: The Making of Peace (London, 2016); Joanna Craigwood, ‘Diplomatic Metonymy and
Antithesis in 3 Henry VI ’, Review of English Studies, 65 (272) (2014), 812–30; John H. Pollack,
‘Native Performances of Diplomacy and Religion in Early New France’, in Joshua D. Bellin and
Laura L. Meikle (eds), Native Acts: Indian Performance, 1603–1832 (Lincoln, NE, 2011), 81–116; and
select references in notes 44–9.
41 For example Lovro Kunčević, ‘The City whose “ships sail on every wind”: Representations of
Diplomacy in the Literature of Early Modern Ragusa (Dubrovnik)’, in Tracey A. Sowerby and Jan
Hennings (eds), Practices of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World, c.1410–1800 (London, 2017),
65–79; William Rossiter, Wyatt Abroad: Tudor Diplomacy and the Translation of Power (Martlesham,
2014); essays in Jason Powell and William Rossiter (eds), Authority and Diplomacy from Dante to
Shakespeare (Farnham, 2013); Susan Brigden, Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest (London, 2012);
Edward Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate: Culture, Politics and Institutions (Oxford,
2008), 6–36; Kelley, Beyond the Bronze Pillars; Alston, ‘Empire and Emissary’.
42 For example Hugh Adlington, ‘Donne and Diplomacy’, in Jeanne Shami (ed.), Renaissance
Tropologies: the Cultural Imagination of Early Modern England (Pittsburgh, PA, 2008), 187–216;
Rosanna Cox, ‘ “The mountains are in labour, only mice are born”: Milton and Republican Diplomacy’,
Renaissance Studies, 24 (2010), 420–36; Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham (eds), News Networks in
Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2016); Katherine M. MacDonald, ‘Diplomacy and Biography in the
Wars of Religion: Charles Paschal’s Life of Guy du Faur de Pibrac (1584)’, in Bruno Tribout and Ruth
Whelan (eds), Narrating the Self in Early Modern Europe (Bern, 2007), 23–40.
43 For example Sabine Lucia Müller, ‘William Harborne’s Embassies: Scripting, Performing and
Editing Anglo-Ottoman Diplomacy’, in Sabine Schülting, Savine Lucia Müller, and Ralf Hertel (eds),
Early Modern Encounters with the Islamic East: Performing Cultures (Farnham, 2012), 11–26; Robyn
Adams and Rosanna Cox (eds), Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture (London, 2011); Thomas V. Cohen
and Germain Warketin (eds), Things Not Easily Believed: Introducing the Early Modern Relation =RR,
34/1–2 (2011); Charry and Shahani (eds), Emissaries, part 1.
studies have steered a course between the highly context-specific and isolated
character of earlier historicist readings of literary works within diplomatic settings44
and the generalizing and imprecise New Historicist use of ‘diplomacy’ in its broadest
social meaning to denote the negotiation of any power relations.45 Books by John
Watkins on pre-modern marriage diplomacy, Ellen Welch on French diplomacy and
the performing arts, and Christopher Warren on literature and the law of nations
have compellingly placed readings of individual works within the wider relationship
between early modern literary and diplomatic culture.46 The field they have helped
initiate brings together a constellation of recent interests within early modern liter-
ary studies: translation, travel writing, networks, cross-cultural encounter, rhetoric,
letters, news, espionage, the law, the material text, the archive, cultural and political
history and theory, and new forms of historicism.
Meanwhile there have been significant developments in scholarly approaches to
the history of diplomacy.47 The work of Donald Queller and Garrett Mattingly
dominated studies of late medieval and early modern diplomacy for much of the
later twentieth century. Over the last two decades or so, there have been repeated
calls for new methodological and theoretical approaches to diplomatic history;
John Watkins placed literature at the heart of his appeal.48 The ‘new diplomatic
history’ that has emerged integrates broader concerns—such as ambassadors’ agency
and ritual action—into a field that was once dominated by the study of bureaucracy
and foreign policy.49 Historians continue to analyse the traditional documents,
foreign policy decisions, and peace congresses that have always been at the heart of
diplomatic history, but do so using new methodologies and asking new questions.50
This necessitates rethinking our approaches to a range of diplomatic texts and opens
up new avenues through which to do so. In common with literary studies, for
instance, diplomatic history has experienced a ‘material turn’ that explores the sig-
nificance of the material artefacts and environments associated with negotiations,
44 For example Paul Sellin, So Doth, So Is Religion: John Donne and Diplomatic Contexts in the
Reformed Netherlands, 1619–1620 (Columbia, 1988).
45 For example Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (London,
1980), chs 1, 3.
46 John Watkins, After Lavinia: A Literary History of Premodern Marriage Diplomacy (Ithaca, 2017),
chs 5–6; Ellen R. Welch, A Theater of Diplomacy: International Relations and the Performing Arts in
Early Modern France (Philadelphia, 2017); Christopher Warren, Literature and the Law of Nations,
1580–1680 (Oxford, 2015).
47 See Tracey A. Sowerby, ‘Early Modern Diplomatic History’, History Compass, 14/9 (2016),
441–56; Jan Hennings and Tracey A. Sowerby, ‘Introduction: Practices of Diplomacy’, in Sowerby
and Hennings (eds), Practices of Diplomacy, 1–21.
48 For example Karl W. Schweizer and Matt J. Schumann, ‘The Revitalisation of Diplomatic History:
Renewed Reflections’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 19/2 (2008), 149–86; John Watkins (ed.), ‘Toward a New
Diplomatic History of Medieval and Early Modern Europe’ = JMEMS, 38/1 (2008), esp. 1–14.
49 For example Karina Urbach, ‘Diplomatic History since the Cultural Turn’, HJ, 46 (2003), 991–7;
Torstan Riotte and Markus Mösslang (eds), The Diplomats’ World: A Cultural History of Diplomacy,
1815–1914 (Oxford, 2008).
50 For example Lucein Bély, La société des princes, XVIe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1999); Daniela Frigo
(ed.), Politics and Diplomacy in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge, 1999); Christoph Kampmann,
Maximilian Lanzinner, and Guido Braun (eds), L’art de la paix: Kongresswesen und Friedensstiftung im
Zeitalter des Westfälischen Friedens (Münster, 2011); Carlo M. Bajetta, Guillaume Coatelen, and Jonathan
Gibson (eds), Elizabeth I’s Foreign Correspondence: Letters, Rhetoric, and Politics (Basingstoke, 2014).
and could profitably be extended into the textual world of diplomacy, as Tracey
Sowerby’s contribution to this volume demonstrates.51 The mutual relevance of her
analysis of the ceremonial diplomatic reception of decorated letters and Hampton’s
discussion, in his chapter, of the diplomatic significance of the destruction of two
material ‘ambassadors’—a royal portrait and a text—in Calderón’s 1628 play El
Príncipe Constante exemplifies this kind of shared interest.
Lucien Bély has encouraged us to view early modern international relations as
occurring within a ‘society of princes’, where the familial interests of individual
rulers dictated the foreign policy of their countries, even as those same polities
developed sophisticated bureaucracies.52 Bély’s emphasis on dynastic concerns has
helped to highlight the importance of sociability and familial networks at the
highest levels of diplomatic activity. More recent scholarship has also viewed dip-
lomacy as a socio-political process and placed more weight on the importance of
individual diplomats’ actions and networks.53 It has often defined ‘diplomat’ more
broadly than earlier scholarship, incorporating the interpreters, secretaries, and other
actors who served below the level of accredited ambassador into our understanding
of the diplomatic process.54 At the same time, scholars have recognized that non-
princely polities engaged in asymmetric relations with the ‘society of princes’. The
strategies they adopted in order to gain diplomatic recognition have profound
repercussions for our understanding of these polities’ diplomatic reports and cere-
monial records.55 These findings about the identities, networks, and transactions of
early modern diplomatic actors inevitably affect our understanding of how literary
products and skills might fit into this complex, multi-dimensional, and contingent
diplomatic landscape.
Diplomacy was both a written and a performative activity. By paying attention
to diplomatic performances, particularly the meaning of ritual within diplomatic
audiences, historians have shown the non-verbal means by which relations between
princes were mediated. Ceremonial gestures, titles, and spatial hierarchies all
51 For example Harriet Rudolph and Gregor M. Metzig (eds), ‘Material Culture in Modern
Diplomacy from the 15th to the 20th Century’, Jahrbuch für Europäische Geschichte, 17 (2016); Nancy
Ulm and Leah R. Clark (eds), The Art of Embassy: Objects and Images of Early Modern Diplomacy =
JEMH, 20/1 (2016); Mark Häberlein and Christof Jeggle (eds), Materielle Grundlagen der Diplomatie:
Schenken, Sammeln und Verhandeln in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Konstanz, 2013); Maija
Jansson, Art and Diplomacy: Seventeenth-century English Decorated Royal Letters to Russia and the Far
East (Leiden, 2015).
52 Bély, La société des princes.
53 For example Hillard von Thiessen and Christian Windler (eds), Akteure der Aussenbeziehungen:
Netzwerke und Interkulturalität im historischen Wandel (Cologne, 2010).
54 For example Daniel Riches, Protestant Cosmopolitanism and Diplomatic Culture: Brandenburg-
Swedish Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden, 2013); Martje van Gelder and Tijana Krstić
(eds), Cross-confessional Diplomacy and Diplomatic Intermediaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean =
JEMH, 19/2–3 (2015).
55 On asymmetry in diplomatic practice see Tilman Haug, Nadir Weber, and Christian Windler (eds),
Protegierte und Protektoren: Asymmetrische politische Beziehungen zwischen Partnerschaft und Dominanz
(16. bis frühes 20. Jahrhundert) (Cologne, 2016); André Krischer, Reichsstädte in der Fürstengesellschaft:
Politischer Zeichengebrauch in der frühen Neuzeit (Darmstadt, 2006).
contributed to the construction of international relationships.56 Moreover, symbolic

diplomatic communication and its negotiation has been conceptualized as consti-
tuting cultural exchange between the representatives of the normative systems in
question.57 The relationship between this symbolic sphere and the textual world of
diplomacy has important implications both for our interpretation of literary depic-
tions of diplomacy and for our understanding of diplomatic and para-diplomatic
texts. At the same time, literary-critical attention to written diplomatic texts could
further expose their symbolic dimensions and linguistic manipulations.
The dynamics created by these developments and the need they have generated
for concerted interdisciplinary collaboration to investigate the international con-
text of early modern literature and the role of literature in early modern diplomacy
inspired the research network and activities from which the current volume has
emerged. Organized by the editors of the current volume and funded by the UK Arts
and Humanities Research Council, ‘Textual Ambassadors: Cultures of Diplomacy
and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World’ brought together scholars from
different national academic traditions and different disciplinary perspectives.58 Our
aim was to excavate the relationship between diplomatic practice and literary culture
in the early modern period and to develop the nascent interdisciplinary field of
diplo-literary studies by building upon recent developments in both literary studies
and the ‘new diplomatic history’. Since its formation, many of the network’s mem-
bers have published the books, collections, or essays that have initiated this field and
we have benefited from each other’s insights in conversation and in writing.59 Yet
individual literary studies necessarily give a dispersed and partial picture, whilst the
few previous collections bringing together work on literature and diplomacy lacked
the involvement of historians and so the fuller engagement with historical research
achieved by this interdisciplinary network and volume.60
The interdisciplinary essays in this volume address core emerging areas within
diplomatic poetics. Each of the volume’s four sections—on literary engagements,
translation, dissemination and diplomatic documents—focuses on a specific aspect
of the literary-diplomatic relationship, moving from the traditional materials of
literary study to the traditional materials of historical study, while retaining the
56 William Roosen, ‘Early Modern Diplomatic Ceremonial: A Systems Approach’, JMH, 52

(1980), 452–76; Ralph Kauz, Jan Paul Niederkorn, and Giorgio Rota (eds), Diplomatisches
Zeremoniell in Europa und dem Mittleren Osten in der Frühen Neuzeit (Vienna, 2009), 1–32; Peter
Burschel and Christine Vogel (eds), Die Audienz: ritualisierter Kulturkontakt in der frühen Neuzeit
(Cologne, 2014); Jan Hennings, Russia and Courtly Europe: Ritual and the Culture of Diplomacy,
1648–1725 (Cambridge, 2016).
57 For a seminal discussion see Christian Windler, ‘Diplomatic History as a Field for Cultural
Analysis: Muslim-Cultural Relations in Tunis, 1700–1840’, HJ, 44 (2001), 79–106.
58 Grant reference no. AH/K001930/1.
59 For example, Watkins, After Lavinia; Sowerby and Hennings (eds), Practices of Diplomacy; Hennings,
Russia and Courtly Europe; Sowerby, ‘Early Modern Diplomatic History’; Warren, Literature and the Law
of Nations; Raymond and Moxham (eds), News Networks; José María Pérez Fernández, ‘Translation,
Diplomacy and Espionage: New Insights into James Mabbe’s Career’, Translation and Literature, 23
(2014), 1–22.
60 Rivère de Carles (ed.), Early Modern Diplomacy; Powell and Rossiter (eds), Authority and
Diplomacy; Charry and Shahani (eds), Emissaries.
conversational engagement between literary and historical scholars and approaches

established by the network. All of the essays share the common endeavour to estab-
lish new frameworks for understanding the relationship between early modern
literature and diplomacy that—alongside the findings below—will structure this
emerging field. Some essays draw on theories or methodologies from other areas
that shed new light on the field, as Joanna Craigwood does with myth theory, José
María Pérez Fernández with theories of cross-cultural communication, and Fabio
Antonini with the social history of the archive. Others reconceptualize central
premises of the field, as Joad Raymond does with diplomatic geographies and
Andras Kiséry with diplomatic publics. Still others establish new models for literary
involvement with diplomacy, informed by fuller readings of the politics of dramatic
space (Timothy Hampton), the fictionality of the law of nations (Mark Netzloff
and John Watkins), or the local circumstances of translation (Catarina Fouto and
Peter Auger). The final essays of the volume in turn propose new methodological
approaches to diplomatic documents, as Jan Hennings re-examines their genres,
Christine Vogel their rhetoric, Tracey Sowerby their material qualities, and André
Krischer their ritual histories.
Part I of the volume, on ‘literary engagements’, privileges discussions of literary
representations of diplomacy and draws out the toolkits and structures of thought
that literary culture brings to diplomacy. Building on the essays in this section, we
maintain that literary ability was crucial to both diplomatic practice and ambassador-
ial prestige; develop the ways in which depictions of diplomacy and international
law provided genre-shaped places for cultural reflection on the rapidly changing
and expanding diplomatic sphere; and propose that the literary sphere held such
central place because it gave diplomats the tools to negotiate the pervasive ambigu-
ities of diplomacy. The essays in Part II examine ‘translation’ as a special case of
literary endeavour that can illuminate the intercultural space inhabited by diplo-
mats. Drawing on this section, we argue that translations exemplify the potential
of literary texts both to provoke competition and to promote cultural convergence
between political communities; and that translation reveals the existence of diplo-
matic third spaces in which ritual, symbolic, or written conventions and semantics
converged despite particular oppositions and differences. In Part III (‘dissemination’),
the focus shifts to ways in which texts both circulated within diplomatic contexts
and disseminated diplomatic knowledge more widely. We propose that the geog-
raphies of literary-diplomatic exchanges, performances, and interpretations were
translocal as much as they were transnational; that within Europe there was increas-
ing public consumption of diplomatic material; and that the archival afterlives of
diplomatic records imposed narratives that significantly shaped their interpretation
and dissemination. The fourth and final section, ‘diplomatic documents’, re-evaluates
our approaches to key texts produced by the diplomatic process in the light of literary
methods and developments in the ‘new diplomatic history’. We conclude from it
that diplomatic documents possessed symbolic capital; that they were produced,
archived, and even redeployed in creative tension with the social and ceremonial
worlds that produced them; and that sensitivity to generic conventions can radically
reshape our interpretation of diplomatic encounters.
The remainder of this Introduction details these findings under headings that
are organized by section but that often draw on evidence from across the entire
volume. Together, these findings for the field act as a guide to the points of interaction
between literature and diplomacy in the early modern world.
L I T E R A RY E N G A G E M E N T S
The importance of oratory, performance, poetic composition, wide reading, and

writerly skill to diplomatic work made the display and manipulation of literary
abilities crucial to both the projected prestige and habitual practices of early mod-
ern diplomats. Whilst such scholars as Hampton and Isabella Lazzarini first made
this connection,61 the collaborative endeavours of our network have allowed us to
establish it over an unprecedented geographical scope and range of literary-
diplomatic activity, and it underlies the diplomatic work examined throughout
this volume. From the circulation of English polemic across Sweden to the literary
genre of Russian diplomatic reports and the rhetorical manipulations of French
diplomatic letters from the Ottoman court, our essays paint a newly global picture
of the manifold intersections between diplomacy and literature across three
centuries of world history. The volume opens with an essay on this central relation-
ship between literary abilities and diplomatic practices within Europe. Drawing on
theories of myth and myth-ritual to make sense of previously unstudied accounts
of the origins of diplomacy in English, Spanish, French, and Italian diplomatic
handbooks, Joanna Craigwood provides a new conceptual framework for under-
standing the relationship between humanist ways of thinking about diplomacy
and the literary character of European diplomatic ritual. Her essay shows how
these origin myths related the invention of diplomacy to the invention of rhetoric,
poetry, and song, intertwining the foundational identity of the institution with the
first acquisition and display of literary abilities and products, and so naturalized
literary display within diplomatic ritual.
The centrality of literary skills, techniques, and tropes to early modern diplomacy
informed analogies and reciprocities between the spheres that made literature an
especially powerful cultural space for reflecting on diplomacy. When works of
imaginative literature portrayed diplomatic events, they not only commented on
them directly, but also reflected upon their own comparable representations, and
in the process offered their tools back again to diplomacy. This mutual reflection
and influence—captured by both Hampton’s ‘diplomatic moment’ in literature
and Warren’s work on literary form and international law—has also recently been
independently observed by scholars working in the field of International Relations.
Paul Sheeran has read literary texts ahistorically for ideas about contemporary IR,
whilst Deep Dhatta Ray has argued that some texts become so engrained in pol-
itical culture that they shape international relations, allowing him to locate the
61 Hampton, Fictions of Embassy; Lazzarini, Communication and Conflict. For other examples, see
above 1–5.
very foundations of Indian diplomacy in the pre-Mughal epic Mahabharata.62 Part I

of our volume further develops the ways in which literary genres—together with
their associated narratives, styles, techniques and moods, conscious fictionality,
performativity, and rhetoric—reflected on and shaped early modern diplomatic
and international legal narratives and expectations.
Timothy Hampton advances his own seminal work on diplomacy and literary
form through analysis of the intersecting spaces of dramatic and diplomatic per-
formance. Reading public and private space in plays by Calderón and Shakespeare,
he argues that early modern drama enabled genre-inflected thought about evolving
diplomatic topologies as international political culture increasingly intruded upon
national political spaces. Mark Netzloff then responds to Warren’s call to investigate
further the connection between tragic narratives and international criminality.63
Reading Francisco de Vitoria’s treatise on Spanish colonialism, De Indis (1532),
alongside accounts of Francis Drake’s 1572 alliance with the escaped slave nation
of Cimarrons in Panama, Netzloff interrogates the fiction of ‘lines of amity’ beyond
which European treaty agreements did not hold, arguing for the perceived inevit-
ability of tragic outcomes in the European colonies. John Watkins is (like Netzloff )
interested in fiction and the limits of international law, but examines the role
played instead by a literary and rhetorical quality—pathos—in shaping narrative
expectation about treaty outcomes, underlining the structural role literary devices
beyond genre could play in organizing expectations of diplomatic action over time.64
Pathos (he argues) repeatedly expressed the conflict between extravagant hope and
disillusioning experience about treaties, both in such fictional texts as Philip Sidney’s
sixteenth-century epic romance Arcadia and in wider diplomatic culture. Watkins’
contribution highlights how early modern diplomats might turn to fiction-making
in order to comprehend their own experiences of the failures of international law.
Yet as Hampton reminds us, diplomacy also allowed literary fiction to make sense
of its generic development over time, underlining the mutuality of the relationship
between the spheres: for Proust, he concludes, the nostalgia-laden figure of the
diplomat who inhabits the modern novel brings from his early modern past into
this dominant modern genre the very possibility of performance and writing.
In effect, literary genres and their associated narratives, tropes, styles, spaces, and
qualities provided ways of organizing the multiplicities of spaces (Hampton), times
(Watkins) and actors (Netzloff ) through which diplomacy operated. Ways were
needed. Diplomacy, whilst always beset by uncertainties, was particularly marked
by ambiguity in the early modern period, while it was undergoing rapid changes
and expansion, but before it became fully professionalized. As the geographical
reach of diplomatic networks expanded, whilst cross-cultural knowledge of the norms
governing political behaviour remained limited even within a continent, it was often
unclear what diplomatic rituals involved, who should participate in them, or who
62 Paul Sheeran, Literature and International Relations: Stories in the Art of Diplomacy (Aldershot,
2007); Deep Datta-Ray, The Making of Modern Indian Diplomacy: A Critique of Eurocentrism (London,
2015).
63 Ibid., 30. 64 Compare Craigwood, ‘Diplomatic Metonymy’.
even was sovereign. At the same time, ambiguity has often been valued in literature
as the basis of subtlety, depth, richness, and longevity, presenting opportunities for
interpretation, creativity, and reinvention over time.65 What we mean by ‘literature’
and ‘literary’ remains—paradoxically—ambiguous too, here and throughout the
volume: distinctions between literary and historical writing were not clear in the early
modern period; to be ‘literary’ then meant to be a person of learning and implied
knowledge of philosophy, science, history, and classical and contemporary litera-
ture; and a wide range of fictional and non-fictional texts rightly form the material
of both literary and historical studies today. Yet a working definition of the terms
for our purposes could be writing, and associated qualities, that involved imaginative,
formal, and rhetorical shaping of material. Understood in this way, literature and
literary tropes and skills proved so very valuable to diplomats in this period because
they helped negotiate diplomatic ambiguity.66
Diplomatic ambiguities could be unproductive, leading to fears, confusions,
mistakes, and conflicts. In these cases literary forms, tropes, skills, and tools could
help rationalize or contain these effects, placing them at one remove, as dramatic
form did for contested political spaces (Hampton), tragedy for negotiations with
non-state agents, stateless persons, and colonial subjects (Netzloff ), and pathos
for treaty failure (Watkins). Literary skills could also help diplomats negotiate
unproductive ambiguities through open-ended performances, texts, and interpret-
ations, or rhetorical and narrative re-appropriation, as (for example) Christine Vogel
argues elsewhere in this volume. Yet ambiguities could also be productive for dip-
lomats seeking subtle persuasions, convenient double meanings, manipulations of
truths or agreements, or flexible commitments—and literary works and experience
provided models and toolkits (rhetorical, narrative, creative, interpretive, and so on)
for manipulating and interpreting richly valuable ambiguities. Mercury—divine
ambassador, orator, and trickster—provided a mythical pattern for the pragmatic
exploitation of literary skills (Craigwood) and such manipulations of unfixed
meaning appear in virtually every essay in this volume, whether (for example) in
the narrative shaping of materials from the Venetian archives (Fabio Antonini), the
poetic styling of Scottish translations from French (Peter Auger), or the international
re-interpretations of Portuguese epic (Catarina Fouto).
T R A N S L AT I O N
The essays in Part II build upon the recent move in translation studies from a uni-
versalizing tendency towards a more context-specific approach that privileges the
contingent social and political circumstances in which translations were undertaken.67
65 For example Lisa Otty and Andrew Michael Roberts, ‘ “Dim-conceived glories of the brain”: On
Ambiguity in Literature and Science’, Culture, Theory and Critique, 54 (2013), 37–55; William
Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London, 1930).
66 With thanks to Jan Hennings for introducing this idea to discussion among network members.
67 For a concise discussion of recent scholarship see Carol O’Sullivan, ‘Introduction: Rethinking
Methods in Translation History’, Translation Studies, 5 (2012), 131–8.
Recent studies examining the relationship between translation, print culture, travel,
and the book trade have highlighted the transnational nature of early modern literary
communities and the close relationship between the literary cultures of particular
polities.68 Given the centrality of translation to the European Renaissance,69 these
studies suggest the critical need to excavate further the ways in which diplomacy
and literary translation interacted. Diplomats, translators, and interpreters were at
the forefront of cultural translation between polities;70 their privileged place as
agents of cultural exchange offers an important window into the overlapping
diplomatic and literary cultures of the early modern world. For example, several
Ottoman diplomats and dragomans undertook translations that engaged Ottomans
with European political and religious ideas and history and vice versa.71 They and
their European peers often translated creatively, producing ‘tradaptions’ and trans-
lations that can be considered acts of authorship on the part of the translator,72
meaning that the circumstances of their missions could profoundly influence the
target texts they produced.
As Auger suggests in this section, translations represent ‘durable literary moments’
amid otherwise ephemeral, shifting political alliances. These translations exemplify
the abilities of literary texts to contribute to both competition and convergence
between nations, as well as epitomizing the relationship between diplomatic activ-
ity and patriotic sentiment. Pérez Fernández argues that—just as the ceremonial
battles fought at early modern courts could serve as a substitute for military
conflict73—para-diplomatic translation could also constitute war by other means.
Catarina Fouto’s study of the reception of Luís de Vaz de Camões’s The Lusiads brings
this into sharp focus. Rival editions and translations of this influential celebration
of the Portuguese empire claimed the poem for competing Spanish and Portuguese
visions of Portugal’s place in the international order, whilst a range of European
translators used it to signal their polities’ hostility towards Habsburg imperial
ambitions after 1640. The Lusiads was sufficiently malleable to serve conflict, con-
nection, and patriotism in different diplomatic contexts.
68 For example Carmine di Biase (ed.), Travel and Translation in the Early Modern Period
(Amsterdam, 2006); Sara Barker and Brenda M. Hosington (eds), Renaissance Cultural Crossroads:
Translation, Print and Culture in Britain, 1473–1640 (Leiden, 2013); José María Pérez Fernández and
Edward Wilson-Lee, Translation and the Book Trade in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2014); Tania
Demetriou and Rowan C. Tomlinson (eds), The Culture of Translation in Early Modern England and
France, 1500–1660 (Basingstoke, 2015), 22–40. On ‘transnational’ as it pertains to early modern lit-
erature see Warren Boutcher, ‘Intertraffic: Transnational Literatures and Languages in Late Renaissance
England and Europe’, in Matthew MacLean and Sara Barker (eds), International Exchange in the Early
Modern Book World (Leiden, 2016), 343–73, esp. 353–5.
69 Jane Tylus and Karen Newman (eds), Early Modern Cultures of Translation (Philadelphia, 2015).
70 E. Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul
(Oxford, 2012), 165–86.
71 Tijana Krstić, ‘Of Translation and Empire: Sixteenth-century Ottoman Imperial Translators as
Renaissance Go-betweens’, in Christine Woodhead (ed.), The Ottoman World (Abingdon, 2009),
130–42.
72 On tradaptation and authorship see Peter Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia (eds), Cultural Translation
in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2007).
73 Toby Osborne, ‘The Surrogate War between the Savoys and the Medici: Sovereignty and
Precedence in Early Modern Italy’, International History Review, 29 (2007), 1–21.
Literature can work as a form of cultural diplomacy because it invites readers to

imagine foreign cultures and peoples. Works, like The Lusiads, that served as national
epics could be used to comment with particular power on the relationship between
polities. Poetry likewise participated in a nuanced textual diplomacy: it could be
central to cultivating cultural and politico-religious links within the European society
of princes. Translators strategically adapted their poetic voices to cohere more
closely with the rhetorical, formal and structural strategies of their interlocutors, as
Auger observes. Examining a series of ‘thick’ translations between the French court
and Scottish king, Auger argues that cultural convergence was forged between the
French and Scottish courts not just through shared texts, but also through shared
stylistic features. Aspects of verse composition and translation such as structure,
prosody, and diction became a means of diplomatic signalling, creating shared
Protestant bonds and identifying shared communities of ‘others’.
The essays in this section collectively suggest that there were diplomatic ‘third
spaces’ in which the common language might be one of ritual, symbolic, or written
exchange—or a combination of the three—and not purely oral. Later essays reinforce
this point by showing diplomats’ careful analyses of unfamiliar ceremonial forms
(Hennings), the symbolic value of written records (Krischer), and the importance
of the material qualities and ritual reception of letters sent from Europe to the
Middle East and Asia (Sowerby). Such diplomatic third spaces do not presuppose
communities of shared interests but rather describe emerging communities in
which conventions and semantics converge, and might also comprehend a com-
munity of enemies, as Pérez Fernández argues. His exploration of transnational
diplomatic and textual networks that shared common translators and texts pro-
poses that the aggregation of diplomatic third spaces within networks underpinned
a growing international community, as the symbolic capital of translation was used
to demarcate a scholarly and diplomatic elite. By approaching translation through
a communicative turn, Pérez Fernández clarifies the ways in which literature both
created diplomatic communities and formed a means of articulating difference
within and between those communities. Translation occupies a special place within
literary-diplomatic relations because it exposes what polities and cultures can and
cannot share.
D I S S E M I N AT I O N
Ambassadors moved texts across borders as writers, consumers, patrons, and clients;
some even promoted the spread of writing technologies.74 The dissemination of
texts, particularly printed polemic and news, became an integral to the ambassador’s
duties.75 Concurrently, the household of the resident ambassador was a hub for the
74 Martin Lowry, ‘Diplomacy and the Spread of Printing’, in L. Hellinga and J. Goldfinch (eds),
Bibliography and the Study of 15th-century Civilisation (London, 1987), 124–37.
75 For example Marika Keblusek, ‘Book Agents: Intermediaries in the Early Modern World of
Books’, in H. Cools, Marika Keblusek, and Badeloch Noldus (eds), Your Humble Servant: Agents in
Early Modern Europe (Hilversum, 2006), 104–7; Tracey A. Sowerby, ‘ “All our books do be sent into
exchange and collection of books.76 Existing work on the literary productions

involved in early modern diplomacy predominantly focuses on the entertainments
and exchanges embedded in the conduct of court diplomacy, but embassy journeys
and households, together with the wider networks of intermediaries who serviced
diplomatic relationships, also formed transmission networks for diplomatic
knowledge and information communities through which texts accrued meaning
that extended well beyond the court.77 Venice’s diplomatic interpreters, for example,
not only produced and circulated knowledge about the Ottomans but also created
transimperial networks of kinship and patronage that ultimately shaped the emerging
distinction between Europe and the Levant.78 To understand the literary-diplomatic
relationship fully, we need to integrate court-centric accounts with a fuller under-
standing of the non-courtly production, circulation, reception, interpretation, and
re-interpretation of literary-diplomatic texts and performances.
Joad Raymond opens this section of the volume with an illuminating example
of such ‘translocal’ diplomatic geographies emerging from three texts: John Milton’s
international polemic Defensio (1651), which he wrote while Secretary of Foreign
Tongues for the English Commonwealth; the English ambassador Bulstrode
Whitelocke’s journal of his embassy to Sweden recounting conversations about the
Defensio; and Milton’s Defensio Secunda (1654). Whitelocke’s account of the role
the Defensio played in the reception of his embassy in a small town whilst he was
journeying through Sweden demonstrates the local reach of international polemic
and reveals the responses it elicited in lower as well as higher levels of government.
Other essays in the volume also gesture at the importance of extra-courtly contexts:
Pérez Fernández’s translation-centric networks, for example, had translocal as well
as transnational dynamics. Taken together with this section’s attention to local
publics’ consumption of diplomatic material, these examples suggest the importance
of further research into the local and translocal geographies and networks of literary-
diplomatic exchange.
With the proliferation of print and the growing circulation of written news in
Europe came increased public dissemination of diplomatic knowledge. András
Kiséry’s essay examines the growing public appetite for such knowledge. Looking
at the popular print handbooks and public stage plays of seventeenth-century
England, he finds that the possession of expert diplomatic knowledge became a
form of cultural capital. Publics wanted to know about the specialist, semi-secretive,
and gradually professionalizing world of diplomacy—and so consumed it in
fictional and non-fictional, print, and stage incarnations—because it helped them
other countreys and translated”: Henrician Polemic in its International Context’, EHR, 121 (2006),
1271–99; essays by Elizabeth Williamson and Tracey A. Sowerby in Raymond and Moxham (eds),
News Networks.
76 Joanna Craigwood, ‘Diplomats and International Book Exchange’, in Ann Thomson, Simon
Burrows, and Edmond Dziembowski (eds), Cultural Transfers: France and Britain in the Long Eighteenth
Century (Oxford, 2010), 57–69.
77 For example Diego Pirillo, ‘Venetian Merchants as Diplomatic Agents: Family Networks and
Cross-Confessional Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe’, in Rivère de Carles (ed.), Early Modern
Diplomacy, 183–203.
78 Rothman, Brokering Empire.
socially and professionally to be able to talk foreign politics. In his essay, Antonini
connects this phenomenon with the increasing production of diplomatic paperwork
and increasingly managed state repositories, as ruling elites manipulated public
political debate, and as state officials privately fed a burgeoning market for ambas-
sadorial reports with manuscript copies that re-appeared throughout Europe in
libraries, political compendia, and historical writings. Antonini and Kiséry’s nuanced
understandings of the formation and nature of the political publics for diplomatic
material help revise our existing narratives and historiography about the emerging
European public sphere and suggest the value of further research into the public
consumption of diplomacy outside Europe.
New interest in the social history of the archive has drawn attention to the prac-
tices, processes, and transactions that underpinned documentation, record keeping,
and the formation and expansion of official archives in early modern Europe.79
Understanding the social and material history of diplomatic documents is vital to
the way we read them and the histories—both early modern and modern—that
make use of them as sources. Antonini makes that point powerfully in his essay on
the Secret Chancery of the Republic of Venice, first opened to the city’s state
historians during the sixteenth century, and the role of that archive in shaping his-
torical narratives. The outbreak of the War of Cyprus in 1570 was a pivotal moment
in Venice’s diplomatic relations, marking the breakdown of the Republic’s relations
with Constantinople and its entry into league with the major Catholic powers of
Europe. The ambassadorial records dating from this period were amongst the first
to be recorded in a new series of archival registers that—as Antonini shows—heavily
affected the way in which details of the war were relayed from the archive to the
reading public by state historians. Later in the volume, Vogel argues that the dissem-
ination of diplomats’ texts was shaped as much by their efforts of self-promotion
as by their official obligations, whilst André Krischer shows the importance of
documents and their storage to diplomatic ritual. Attention to the material and
social histories of diplomatic texts, and the narrative shaping imposed by those
histories, is necessary both if we are to appreciate their early modern socio-political
functions and if we are to use them sensitively as sources today.
D I P L O M AT I C T E X T S
The final section of the volume is inspired by two interrelated questions: how,
methodologically, should we approach the texts that were produced through
diplomatic practices? and what can literary perspectives contribute to our under-
standing of diplomatic documents? The essays in this section discuss the documents
that were at the heart of diplomacy—letters and diplomats’ reports. Scholars have
a tendency to use a range of different genres of documents—including letters,
relazione, ceremonial accounts, contemporary histories, travel reports, and literary
79 See for example Alexandra Walsham (ed.), ‘The Social History of the Archive: Record-Keeping
in Early Modern Europe’, P&P, 230 (2016), issue supplement 11.
texts—when constructing their analyses of early modern international relations.

By treating such texts with little discrimination historians have misunderstood the
degree of cultural incommensurability at play between polities with very obviously
different normative systems. But, as Jan Hennings demonstrates, paying closer
attention to generic conventions can transform our interpretation of these sources.
Just as literary writings used the narrative and stylistic resources of different genres
to comprehend diplomatic events (Hampton, Watkins), so too different dynamics
shaped the content and tone of the various genres of diplomatic writing. Appreciating
the conventions adopted in these different genres often reveals a complex picture:
a diplomat who might dismiss the foreign culture he encountered at his host court
as ‘barbaric’ in memoranda might nonetheless dispassionately analyse the ceremonial
means by which that court functioned. In other words, diplomats could recognize
common value-systems or semiotic codes at work in different normative systems.
Indeed, as Vogel suggests, painting the ‘other’ as barbaric could be a useful self-
fashioning strategy for ambassadors who were eager to prove their usefulness or make
excuses for their failures to politicians at home.
This section demonstrates the benefits of applying insights and methodologies
from the ‘new diplomatic history’ to the analysis of diplomatic texts. Vogel’s essay
addresses the implications of an ‘actor-centred’ focus for our approaches to ambas-
sador’s letters. In her case study of the letter-writing practices of the French
ambassador Pierre Girardin, who served in Constantinople in the 1680s, Vogel warns
against taking a narrow bureaucratic approach to ambassadors’ reports. Diplomats
needed to maintain their place within aristocratic society while abroad; their strat-
egies of dissemination, as much as the epistolary etiquette they used, were vital
means by which they did so.80 By placing diplomatic letter writing within the broader
aristocratic sociability of early modern Europe, Vogel highlights that individual
diplomats’ concerns for self-promotion shaped not only the contents of their
missives, but also the archival record that has come down to us. As André Krischer
shows, this concern was shared by towns too, whose efforts to exploit the social
aspects of diplomatic practice in order to gain symbolic capital generated their own
diplomatic texts.
As Vogel also stresses, the ambassador’s act of recording ceremonial encounters
was itself a cultural transaction. Recognizing the performativity of diplomatic
encounters and the complex relationship between the act and its recording neces-
sitates developing new forms of textual analysis and/or new analytical categories. In
her wide-ranging examination of Italian Renaissance diplomacy, Lazzarini framed
diplomacy as a political language marked by two components, one rational, one
emotional, which she broadly maps onto verbal and non-verbal means of commu-
nication.81 However, the supposedly ‘rational’ and the symbolic forms of politics
cannot be easily separated, nor should they necessarily be, as scholars such as
80 On epistolary etiquette see Giora Sternberg, ‘Epistolary Ceremonial: Corresponding Status at

the Time of Louis XIV’, P&P, 204 (2009), 33–88. On aristocratic culture and diplomacy see Hillard
von Thiessen, ‘Diplomatie vom type ancien: Überlegungen zu einem Idealtypus des frühneuzeitlichen
Gesandtschaftswesens’, in von Thiessen and Windler (eds), Akteure, 471–503.
81 Lazzarini Communication and Conflict, see esp. part IV.
Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger have highlighted.82 Their interconnectedness is evident

in André Krischer’s discussion of the ceremonial registers of the Free Imperial cities
of Germany, where ‘writing was crucial for the symbolic dimensions of urban
diplomacy’.83 Polities trying to claim diplomatic status could use the records of
their transactions with diplomatic actors to further their claims to status within the
international society of princes, as these cities did. Their ceremonial registers not
only recorded diplomatic interactions, they also inscribed diplomatic precedents,
becoming textual representatives of the treatment that the cities and their diplomats
could claim in the future. Krischer and Sowerby, like Antonini, highlight the
importance of considering how letters, relazione, and other diplomatic texts could,
and sometimes did, have diplomatic utility beyond their initial purpose.
Combining an analysis of diplomatic ceremonial and material texts, Sowerby
advocates a multidisciplinary approach to princely correspondence. Addressing the
complex interaction of epistolary etiquette, ritual practice, and the ephemeral
material world of early modern courts, she argues that the (often highly decorative)
letters English monarchs sent to non-European princes are best understood not
simply as expressions of magnificence, but as a reflection of the recognition of
visual and material culture as a communicative mechanism in its own right. Their
material features were intended to articulate specific messages—sometimes simple,
sometimes more complex—that complemented or complicated the words of the
letter and that could be used to claim, not just reflect, the relative status of sender
and recipient. Moreover, the physical form of royal correspondence was shaped by
the ritual actions with which they were received and the material environments in
which these rituals occurred across the early modern world.
Whilst the essays in this section show how much literary perspectives have to
offer our readings of diplomatic documents, the essays elsewhere in the volume
demonstrate the extent of the connections between the literary and diplomatic
spheres, helping to explain why diplomats and their documents possessed such
literary qualities. Taken together, the four sections point to valuable areas for future
research. Literary style as a diplomatic tool (Auger, Watkins and Vogel) is virtually
untouched in existing research. Further work on genre (Hampton, Netzloff, Fouto,
Hennings) could transform existing understandings of diplomatic documents and
contribute to developing new formalist interests within literary criticism.84 The
gendered availability and associations of different genres and styles should feed
into much-needed future research into gender and early modern diplomacy.85
82 Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Des Kaisers alte Kleider: Verfassungsgeschichte und Symbolsprache des
Alten Reiches (Munich, 2008), 63; Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Zeremoniell, Ritual, Symbol: neue
Forschungen zur symbolischen Kommunikation in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit’, ZHF, 27
(2000), 389–405.
83 See Krischer in this volume 236–7.
84 See Frederic F. Bogel, New Formalist Criticism: Theory and Practice (London, 2013).
85 Work on early modern diplomacy, literature, and gender is suggestive but limited: Edward
Wilson-Lee, ‘Women’s Weapons: Country House Diplomacy and the Countess of Pembroke’s French
Translations’, in Demetriou and Tomlinson (eds), Culture of Translation, 128–44 ; Bella Mirabella,
‘ “In the Sight of All”: Queen Elizabeth and the Dance of Diplomacy’ and Mark Hutchings and Berta
Cano-Echevarría, ‘Between Courts: Female Masquers and Anglo-Spanish Diplomacy, 1603–5’, Early
Approaches from translation and literary studies will provide new insights into the
means, strategies and limitations of cross-cultural diplomatic communication
(Pérez Fernández, Sowerby). Literature has more to tell us about the translocal
geographies of diplomacy beyond courts and centres—in translocal exchanges and
networks and local publics (Raymond, Kiséry)—and in the process about paradip-
lomatic actors of both genders and all classes. Investigations into the social, material
and ritual histories of diplomatic texts and archives (Antonini, Krischer, Sowerby)
need expanding to other polities. Finally, more could be done to connect the dip-
lomatic value of managing ambiguity with the central place literature held within
conceptualizations of early modern diplomacy (Craigwood)—or to propose another
reason for crossovers between the literary and diplomatic spheres that these essays
show to be extraordinarily rich and far-reaching.
Theatre: A Journal Associated with the Records of Early English Drama, 15/1 (2012), 65–89, 91–108;
Madeline Bassnett, ‘ “All the Ceremonyes and Civilityes”: The Authorship of Diplomacy in the
Memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe’, Seventeenth Century, 26 (2011), 94–118; see also Watkins (ed.),
Toward a New Diplomatic History.
PA RT I
L I T E R A RY E N G A G E M E N T S
1
The Place of the Literary in European
Diplomacy
Origin Myths in Ambassadorial Handbooks
Joanna Craigwood
I N T RO D U C T I O N
Myths are the shared stories communities tell to explain aspects of their world,
nature, history, or social, political and religious customs. They are not only narra-
tives of central importance to a community but also reveal core elements of that
community’s beliefs and practices. That makes the mythical accounts of the origins
of diplomacy that appear in early modern European diplomatic treatises a telling
site for exploring the beliefs that underwrote diplomatic practice.1 Diplomatic
origin myths circulated—along with the treatises that contained them—among
European political elites. They expose beliefs prevalent within that international
community about the foundational relationship between diplomacy and the literary
arts. The myths present the invention of diplomacy as synchronous with, and often
related to, the invention of rhetoric, and sometimes also poetry or song. Rhetoric
and poetics were in turn the cornerstones of early modern European literary theory
and practice, and these two arts—of speaking persuasively; and writing poetry or
literature—were perceived as inseparable.2 By emphasizing these connections, dip-
lomatic origin myths constructed a community-wide narrative that intertwined
the primary, foundational identity of the political institution with the acquisition
and display of literary skills, abilities, and products.
These myths can therefore help us understand what was distinctive about the
relationship between early modern European literature and diplomacy. As cultural,
art, and musical historians have established, European diplomatic practice involved
the exchange or display of portraits and other art works, of skilfully crafted tableware,
1 For the importance of myths, including origin myths, to early modern society, see Jean Seznec, The
Survival of the Pagan Gods: the Mythological Tradition and its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art,
trans. Barbara F. Sessions (Princeton, 1972); Frank L. Borchardt, German Antiquity in Renaissance Myth
(Baltimore, 1971), esp. 1–27. Diplomatic origin myths have not been studied. For general definitions
and approaches, see Robert A. Segal, Myth: a Very Short Introduction, 2nd edn (Oxford, 2015), 1–10.
2 Brian Vickers, ‘Rhetoric and Poetics’, in James Hankins (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to
Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, 2007), 713–45 (715).
26 Joanna Craigwood
jewellery, and decorative ornaments, among other objects, and even the loan of
artists, as well as the production of literary works and exchange of material books.
Political messages were encoded in clothing, carriages, the construction and use of
architectural spaces, and musical and operatic performances, as much as they were
in the more literary plays and masques that made use of costume, space and music.3
But diplomatic origin myths expose perceptions about an essential connection
between diplomatic and literary abilities that uniquely underlay literary displays
and exchanges amongst these wider cultural interactions.
Theories of myth that analyse their social function (functionalist theories) are
broadly concerned with how myths promote and sustain social structures, institu-
tions, and hierarchies.4 Such a functionalist approach would suggest that diplomatic
origin myths sought to naturalize literary abilities as unalterable features of the
institutional norms and frequent hierarchical disputes of European diplomacy. At
the same time, myth-ritual approaches view a community’s myths and rituals as
inseparable and mutually reinforcing,5 and suggest further links between the narrative
provided by the origin myths and diplomatic practices that historians are increas-
ingly analysing in terms of socio-cultural ritual.6 Together, these two theoretical
perspectives provide a conceptual connection between widespread humanist literary
ways of thinking about diplomacy in the period, as identified here and elsewhere
by Timothy Hampton and others,7 and the literary character of early modern
European diplomatic practice and ritual also evident in this volume.8
Origin myths occur most frequently in European diplomatic manuals under
accounts of the ‘antiquity’ of embassy, though they are sometimes also implied in
discussions of the necessity of embassy to political life, or in discussions of the (real
or imagined) etymologies of central diplomatic terms. They are most common in
those classically influenced treatises that seek to sketch out an ideal ambassador,
rather than in those treatises that offer more pragmatic accounts of diplomacy based
on recent history and contemporaneous example.9 ‘Antiquity’ accounts of the pol-
itical art are also the most recognizably mythic in character: they tend to reinvent
classical myths or biblical stories or both to reflect on the origins of early modern
European diplomacy. They typically endow diplomacy with moral and religious
3 For an overview of this literature see Tracey A. Sowerby, ‘Early Modern Diplomatic History’,
History Compass 14/9 (2016), 441–56.
4 Segal, Myth, 126–36; the proposer of functionalism Bronislaw Malinowski is discussed below.
5 Ibid, 61–78; myth-ritualists René Girard and Walter Burkert are discussed below.
6 See Jan Hennings, Russia and Courtly Europe: Ritual and the Culture of Diplomacy, 1648–1725
(Cambridge, 2016), 1–7, for a survey of both English and German-language scholarship on political
and diplomatic ritual.
7 Timothy Hampton, Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in the Early Modern World
(Ithaca, 2009); Douglas Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanists and Professions in Renaissance
Italy (Chicago, 2002), 99–152.
8 See also Brian Jeffrey Maxson’s discussion of humanist oratory as an essential part of fifteenth-
century Florentine diplomatic ritual in The Humanist World of Renaissance Florence (Cambridge,
2014), 85–106.
9 The widest-ranging recent discussion of these handbooks is Heidrun Kugeler, ‘ “Le parfait ambas-
sadeur”: the Theory and Practice of Diplomacy in the Century following the Peace of Westphalia’,
D.Phil. thesis University of Oxford (2006), 25–80; the seminal survey Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance
Diplomacy (Harmondsworth, 1955), 181–91.
Origin Myths in Ambassadorial Handbooks 27
authority, and relate its invention to the civilizing of brute and warring nature and
the origin of human socio-political institutions. Their fundamental function is to
ensure adherence to contemporary diplomatic rules and rituals by presenting the
breakdown of these contingent customs as an inevitable path to widespread human
brutality and anarchy.
The connection between the origins of diplomacy and of rhetoric and poetry
that is of central interest to this volume appears within this wider framework of
mythic belief. The classical myths, and to a lesser extent the biblical stories, that are
recycled in the treatises effectively oppose the combined appearance of the diplo-
matic and literary arts with a pre-civilized humanity that is amoral, irreligious,
anarchic, bestial, and warring. In this way they additionally imply that without a
rhetorical and poetic—without a ‘literary’—skillset, diplomatic relations risk break
down, and war and anarchy could once more prevail. Placing literary skills at the
heart of diplomacy in this way naturalized the display of literary skills—oratory,
theatricality, wit, poetic sensibility, power over the bon mot and the mot juste—
within the ceremonies that negotiated diplomatic competition and honour.
This chapter will begin with a detailed reading of just such an account of the
antiquity of embassy by Alberico Gentili, in his 1585 treatise De legationibus libri tres
(Three Books on Embassies). It then places that account within its broader European
cultural moment, drawing on El Enbaxador (The Ambassador) by Juan Antonio
de Vera y Figueroa and L’Ambasciatore (The Ambassador) by Gasparo Bragaccia,
both published in the 1620s. In conclusion, it will draw on an example from James
Howell’s 1664 Treatise of Ambassadors to ask whether it mattered that such appro-
priations of classical myths involved a level of historical and fictional consciousness
about the process of mythologizing diplomacy.
GENTILI ON THE ANTIQUITY OF EMBASSY
Gentili roots diplomacy firmly in the mythical past in his chapter on ‘the reason
for embassies and their antiquity’ in De legationibus.10 He notes that the Romano-
Jewish historian Josephus attributes the origin (origo) of the institution to God,
whose angels are ambassadors, and references the human ambassadors sent by Moses
in the Old Testament.11 He seriously considers the accreditation of the institution
to the historically mythical and purportedly ancient Assyrian king Belus, whose
name had come to stand for the vague ancestral origin of kingship, and whose
invention was bound up with euhemeristic explanations of the Babylonian God
Bel Marduk as an historical personage.12 He repeatedly stresses the antiquity, age,
10 Alberico Gentili, De legationibus libri tres (Hanau, 1594; repr. New York, 1924), 56–9. Translations
and page references given in this chapter are from the companion volume to this facsimile reprint
except where otherwise noted: De legationibus libri tres, introd. by Ernest Nys, trans. by Gordon J. Laing,
2 vols. (New York, 1924), II.51–3.
11 Gentili, De legationibus, II.51.
12 On ancient and medieval sources on Belus as both mythical origin of kingship and euhemeristic
explanation of Bel (Baal) Marduk, see J. D. Cooke, ‘Euhemerism: a Mediaeval Interpretation of
Classical Paganism’, Speculum, 2 (1927), 396–410 (400–5); Seznec, Survival, 14.
28 Joanna Craigwood
and absolute necessity of embassy through his use of emphatic vocabulary, often
employed in the comparative or superlative.13 In this way he endows the institution
with the apparent importance and inevitability of both tradition and need. The
sources he draws on for his account might be described as religious, historical, and
literary, but to Gentili all held historical value. When ‘writers relate’ (scriptores tradunt)
that the oldest form of government, kingship, began under Belus’s son Ninus, for
Gentili, those scriptores—a word covering authors, narrators, and historians—could
as easily include the Roman poet Ovid as the ancient historians Herodotus, Justinus,
and Jordanes.14
Nestled within these evocations of a remote and mythical past, Gentili gives his
opinion that embassy began when men first formed discrete political groups with
commerce, laws, and eventually compacts:
The conclusion to which I have come is that it was after the separation of the nations,
the foundation of kingdoms, the partition of dominions, and the establishment of
commerce that the institution of embassies arose. So long as men were in so primitive
a state as that depicted by Lucretius in his incomparable poem, they were incapable of
respect for the common good, nor did they know enough to adopt customs or laws of
a reciprocal nature. Later, those having contiguous territory began to form friendly
compacts, and to refrain from doing injury or violence to one another. Such is the
statement of the case in Plato’s Protagoras. But since it was inevitable that obligations
and negotiations should arise between organizations having such reciprocity of rights
as exists between nations, commonwealths and kings, and since those organizations
are either unwilling or, as often happens, unable to meet (certainly states can not meet),
it was absolutely necessary [. . .] that others should be appointed, who by representing
the organizations would be able to transact the necessary business. These representatives,
moreover, had to be persons such as we see ambassadors are.15
Like other diplomatic theorists, Gentili uses this account of origins to legitimize
the diplomatic practices he describes by presenting the alternative as a pre-civilized
state of mutual violence, lacking law and even the capacity to form social groups.
Gentili’s sources are important to understanding the connection between the
origins of diplomacy and the origins of rhetoric and poetry implicit in his account.
Marginal notes give two of these as Book 5 of the Roman poet Lucretius’s first-
century bc epicurean epic De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), and Book 1
of De inventione (On Rhetorical Invention), the earliest rhetorical handbook written
13 ‘antiquitate’ (antiquity), ‘antiquior’ (more ancient), ‘antiquissimus’ (most ancient), ‘vetustate’ (age),
‘vetustius’ (older), ‘vetustissimi’ (oldest), ‘necessitas’ (necessity), ‘pernecessarium’ (absolutely necessary),
‘quod incumbat’ (what was necessary). Gentili, De legationibus, I.56–8, II.51–3.
14 Gentili, De Legationibus, I.57, my translation; Laing translates ‘scriptores tradunt’ as ‘the literary
tradition is . . .’, Gentili, De legationibus, II.52. Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. Frank Justus Miller, rev. edn
G. P Goold (Cambridge, 1977) 4.212–13; Herodotus, Histories, ed. A. D. Godley (Cambridge, 1920),
1.7.2; Gentili’s printed marginalia references ‘Justinus, Jordanes and others’. He uses ancient poets as
historical sources throughout De legationibus; on this practice, see Christopher N. Warren, ‘Gentili,
the Poets, and the Laws of War’, in Benedict Kingsbury and Benjamin Straumann (eds), The Roman
Foundations of the Law of Nations: Alberico Gentili and the Justice of Empire (Oxford, 2010), 146–62;
Daniel Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England: Erudition, Ideology, and the ‘Light of Truth’
from the Accession of James I to the Civil War (Toronto, 1990).
15 Gentili, De legationibus, II.51.
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It was still well short of supper-time, and so they stopped at Bob’s
to see the tennis-court. The surface layer was almost finished, and
two sturdy posts for the net, startlingly, shiningly green, had been
sunk. While they admired, Mr. Starling joined them from the house,
and Laurie thanked him for his assistance with the quarry company.
“Glad to have helped, Laurie,” replied Bob’s father. “And that
reminds me. Seen the pear-trees?”
“Pear-trees? No, sir. Not to—to notice them.”
“Come and look at them.” Mr. Starling led Laurie around the corner
of the new court and along the further walk to where a few fruit-trees,
their branches still bare, occupied one corner of the garden. Laurie
viewed the trees interestedly, but failed to note anything remarkable,
and he turned to his guide for enlightenment. Mr. Starling was
selecting two bills from a long black wallet, keeping his back to the
others. He thrust the bills into Laurie’s hand.
“We’d like to help a little, my sister and I,” he said. “Use that in any
way you like, Laurie, but you needn’t say where it came from. If you
need more, let me know.”
“But we don’t really need it, sir,” protested the boy. “We’ve got
twelve dollars, and I don’t believe—”
“Put it in your pocket,” insisted Mr. Starling. “You can find some
way of using it for Miss Comfort’s—er—comfort!” He raised his voice.
“Look promising, don’t they? Lots of fruit this year, I guess. Thomas
is quite a gardener, if you take his word for it.” He turned Laurie
about with a hand on his shoulder and paced back toward the
others. “We feel sort of sorry for that little woman,” he added,
lowering his voice again. “Hard to pull up stakes at her age, I guess.
Ought to do what we can for her, Laurie. Come to me again if you
need some more.”
At supper Dr. Hillman asked the twins to come to his study, and
there he produced a pink slip of paper from a desk drawer and
handed it to Laurie. “My sister and I have wanted to help ever since
we first learned of Miss Comfort’s—ah—embarrassment, but have
been somewhat at a loss to know how to do so. She is greatly
averse to anything resembling charity, as you probably know. To-day
we heard of your interest in the matter, Laurence, and of your—ah—
ingenious solution of the lady’s problem, and it occurred to us that if
we handed a small contribution to you you would doubtless be able
to use it to advantage and at the same time—ah—consider it
confidential.”
“Twenty-five more!” exclaimed Laurie when they were back in No.
16. “Forty from Mr. Starling. Seventy-seven in all! What’ll we do with
it?”
“Blessed if I know!” replied Ned, “unless we install steam heat and
open plumbing!”
CHAPTER XVIII
MISS COMFORT COMES ABOARD
B ehold the Pequot Queen at ten o’clock Saturday morning!

She is freshly painted from end to end on the shoreward side,
gleaming white, with bright yellow trim. The other side is to be done
later. Just now the painter, a sure-enough professional painter from
Joyce & Connell’s, is finishing the upper deck.
The gangway is resplendent, too, for Brose did that himself
yesterday, using plenty of drier. The deck is protected by bits of
board to walk on, although by evening the buff paint will be hard
enough. The doors are to have a second coat later, but as they are
they look pretty fine. Wonderful what paint will do, isn’t it? You’d
hardly think this was the same old Pequot Queen.
But there’s the cabin yet. Linoleum shining with new varnish, walls
and ceiling creamy white, blue and white curtains at the windows,
Miss Comfort’s old stove blackened and polished by Kewpie until
you’d never suspect it was not brand-new! And that’s a real sink in
the corner, even though it isn’t working yet. You just can’t hurry a
plumber! There’ll be a pump alongside, of course. Miss Comfort will
get her drinking-water at the Parmenter’s across the road. They’re
real friendly folks. Mr. Parmenter hauled the coal that’s in the bin in
the boiler-room himself. That shelving is all new. Brose and Bob put
that up. The hanging lamp in the center is one Mrs. Deane had. Miss
Starling sent those flowers. Looks pretty nice, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t
mind living here yourself? Well, neither would I! And look at the view
from those windows; sun sparkling on the water, boats passing!
Think Miss Comfort’ll like it?
That was a busy, bustling morning. As early as Ned and Laurie
and Kewpie reached the Pequot Queen, Polly and Mae and Brose
Wilkins were before them. Although much had been accomplished
yesterday, much remained to be done. Bob arrived an hour later,
bearing a box of flowers from his aunt. Brose, singing as he worked,
dropped his hammer to touch up a spot with a paint-brush,
abandoned paint-brush to seize again on hammer or screw-driver.
Kewpie, eager for employment, got in every one’s way and
accumulated a great deal of fresh white pigment every time he
turned around. The plumber, having set the sink up, went away, and
the awning man arrived to take measurements. The awning was to
cover the rear half of the roof-deck. There had once been an awning
all over the roof, and, although the frame had disappeared, the
sockets into which the uprights had been screwed remained. To put
an awning over the whole roof-deck was beyond their means, but
they could well afford to protect half of it. Brose was going to make
two flower-boxes to fit the benches along the railing and fill them with
earth so that, when summer came, Miss Comfort would have a
veritable roof-garden up there. Brose thought of all sorts of things,
practical and otherwise. One of the practical things was a place to
dry clothes on the small deck forward, where he stretched four
lengths of line from a post set in the flag-pole socket at the extreme
bow to four galvanized iron hooks screwed to the front of the wheel-
house.
At eleven Peter Brown arrived with Miss Comfort’s worldly
belongings. Peter was small and very black; Peter’s horse was small
and presumably white; and Peter’s wagon was small and extremely
ramshackle. How he managed to get so much on it was a question!
A narrow black walnut bedstead in several sections, together with its
appurtenances; a drop-leaf mahogany table; a funny old trunk with a
rounded top; five chairs of assorted shapes and sizes; a packing-
case of cooking-utensils; a barrel of china and crockery; a walnut
what-not; a wash-boiler filled with miscellany; a marble clock
wrapped in a patchwork quilt; some books; three pictures in faded
gilt frames; a huge bundle of bedding; a roll of frayed straw matting;
some braided rugs; a spotless deal table and various other smaller
sundries.
Peter and Brose unloaded at the end of the gangway, and the
boys bore the things aboard. In the cabin Polly and Mae directed the
bestowing of them, wiping everything clean with a dust-cloth as it
was set in place. The packing-case was left on deck, as was the
barrel, but the rest of the things went inside, and when they were all
there there was just room for the two girls to move cautiously about!
But half an hour later there was another tale to tell. The cooking-
utensils were hung on nails, the dishes were on the shelves, the bed
was set up and dressed, the trunk was under the deal table, the rugs
were on the floor, the pictures were hung, the drop-leaf table stood
under the hanging lamp, and order had emerged from chaos. Of
course, as Polly acknowledged, the place did look a trifle crowded,
but she guessed Miss Comfort wouldn’t mind. Two articles alone
defeated their efforts, the what-not and the marble clock. The what-
not, built to fit in a corner, looked sadly out of place at the foot of the
bed, and the marble clock simply cried aloud for a mantel to rest on.
But the corners were all occupied, and there was no mantel; and so
the what-not remained where they had put it, and the clock for the
time being reposed on a window-sill.
Brose hustled the empty case and barrel to the boiler-room, which
compartment held also a supply of kindling-wood and a quarter of a
ton of coal and so didn’t look one bit like a hen-house! Miss Comfort
was to have an early lunch at Mrs. Deane’s, and she and the Widow
were to arrive at the boat about half-past twelve. At exactly twelve
Polly flipped her dust-cloth for the last time, the painter stowed his
belongings in the wheel-house and called it a day, Brose
relinquished his hammer, and seven satisfied and hungry workers
gave their attention to the luncheon that the girls had prepared. To
have dined at school would have prevented the twins and Kewpie
from being on hand at Miss Comfort’s arrival, and they didn’t want to
miss that!
There was plenty to eat, and full justice was done to the viands. It
was a jolly, happy meal, too, for the Pequot Queen looked as none of
them had ever hoped to see it look, and, as Brose remarked, it would
look a sight better before they got through with it. “When the
awning’s up and there’s flowers along the rail there— What color’s
the awning, Laurie?”
“Red and white.”
“Great! And then there’ll be little window-boxes under the two
windows on this side. I’m going to paint ’em white with green
crisscrosses on ’em; sort of lattice-effect, you know. And then I was
thinking this morning that it wouldn’t be hard to make a little flower-
bed on each side of the bridge there later. I could plant morning-
glories or something so’s they’d climb along on the hand-rail. And
some bright things, too, like geraniums or zinnias.”
“Brose,” exclaimed Laurie, “you’re a wonder!” He held aloft a
paper cup filled with hot chocolate. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give
you Mr. Brose Wilkins, without whose assistance—no, directorship
this undertaking would have been a—but a partial success. To his
untiring zeal and—er—”
“There they come!” cried Kewpie excitedly.
And there they did come, Miss Comfort in her best black dress—
and probably her only black dress—and Mrs. Deane, Miss Comfort
at least a yard in advance, Mrs. Deane trying hard to recover the
distance. Polly jumped to the rail and “yoo-hooed” and waved. Miss
Comfort heard and, it seemed, saw the Pequot Queen for the first
time. She stopped short and stared from a half-block away. Mrs.
Deane regained her lost ground and stared, too. For a long moment
the two stood motionless there. Then Miss Comfort started on again,
this time at a funny little half-trot. Once more Mrs. Deane was
outdistanced!
Polly and Ned and Bob ran across the gangway to meet them. The
others remained on deck, Kewpie grinning broadly, Laurie only half
smiling, Mae emitting little whispered ejaculations, and Brose, his
comforting hammer once more in hand, humming a funny sort of
tune under his breath. Miss Comfort’s face was a study as she
paused at the end of the gangway and swept the scene with rapt
gaze. Then, still silent, she declined Ned’s offered assistance and
walked firmly and proudly across the gangway and stepped down
upon her own deck!
It was not until she stood at the cabin door and looked inside that
the little lady became articulate. Then she drew a deep breath and
said, “Well, I never!” in a voice that was scarcely more than a
whisper. Then she was inside, with the others clustering about her
and every one talking at once, Polly apologizing for the clock, Mae
explaining about the what-not, Laurie promising water for the sink
not later than Tuesday, Mrs. Deane exclaiming repeatedly to no one
in particular: “Why, I had no idea! I simply had no idea!”
After a moment or two Miss Comfort seated herself in the walnut
rocker with the gray horsehair upholstering and sighed again. “It’s
too beautiful for words,” she said. She reached out for Polly’s hand
and drew it to her, patting it with little quick gestures. “I never thought
it would be like this, my dear, never, never! I just can’t find any words
to thank you all; not now; perhaps some day—” She searched for
and found her tiny black-bordered handkerchief. Kewpie frowned
and turned toward a window. Gee, she was getting leaky again! But,
as before, Laurie provided a diversion.
“Here’s the fellow that did more than the rest of us put together,”
he said. Miss Comfort looked, and—
“Why, Brose Wilkins!” she cried. “You, too! Why, I didn’t see you!”
Brose shook hands, his broad smile again threatening his ears.
“Yes, Miss Pansy, it’s me,” he said. “But you don’t want to believe
what Laurie tells you. I ain’t done much but swing a hammer. Now,
how you feeling, ma’am?”
“Very happy, Brose,” replied Miss Comfort softly. “Happier than a
person has any right to be at my time of life, I guess. Isn’t it
wonderful?” Her gaze swept over the little white room with its blue
and white curtains aflutter in the sunlit breeze and all her friendly
belongings about. “Doesn’t the picture of grandfather’s ship look
beautifully there, Brose?”
Brose agreed that it did. Every one else agreed that it did.
Secretly, however, Bob, who had hung the article, told himself that
that representation of a barkantine with all sails set plowing through
a muddy-green sea had probably been done by the village sign-
painter!
After that Miss Comfort arose and minutely inspected every inch of
her domain, listening to Laurie’s somewhat involved explanation of
the water system not yet installed, to Ned’s story of the roof-garden
above, to Polly’s reason for placing the wash-boiler here and the
knife-board there, and to Mae’s confidences regarding the
whereabouts of the linen. Then she was taken off along the deck to
see where the coal and wood were kept. At intervals Laurie took a
slip of paper from a pocket and surreptitiously wrote on it. When they
reached the boiler-room he added the mysterious word “coal scuttle”
to several other words already on the paper.
In due course they all returned to the cabin and sat or stood
around and did a good deal of talking and exclaiming and laughing
until, at last, Mrs. Deane jumped up suddenly and announced in a
shocked voice that she must get right back and that she didn’t know
what Miss Billings would be thinking of her! That began a general
exodus. Polly said that she and Mae would be down after supper to
see if everything was all right. She had already offered to remain
during the afternoon, but Miss Comfort had almost pathetically
declined the offer. Miss Comfort, as was evident to all, wanted to be
left quite alone for a while.
“You’re sure you won’t be nervous at night,” asked Mrs. Deane
anxiously, “all alone here like this.”
“Nervous?” repeated Miss Comfort placidly. “Not a bit. No more
than I was in that empty house up there. I never was one of the
scary kind, and down here, with the friendly water around me, I’ll
never be lonesome again.”
“I’ll be looking in now and then,” said Brose. “I’m liable to be
passing most any time, Miss Pansy, and, whenever you want
anything just let me know.”
“And to-morrow,” said Mae, “we’re all coming down to call on you
in your new home, Miss Comfort.”
“Do, my dear, do! Come to-morrow afternoon, and I’ll make some
tea for you. In the morning, of course, I’ll be at church.”
“Church?” said Mrs. Deane. “I wouldn’t try it unless I felt real well,
my dear. It’s a long walk and a real steep one.”
“All the better,” replied Miss Comfort. “All my life I’ve lived so close
to the church that it wasn’t any effort at all. Sometimes I think that if
religion wasn’t made so easy for us we’d think more of it. ’Twon’t do
me a mite of harm to have to walk a little on a Sunday in order to
worship the Lord. And I guess maybe He will approve of it.”
Going back, Laurie, walking beside Polly, said with a relieved sigh:
“Gee, I was glad to get away without having her ask questions, Polly!
I thought every minute she’d want to know where everything came
from and how we had paid for it!”
“I know,” said Polly thoughtfully. “It’s sort of queer she didn’t, too.
Because she must know that white-enameled sinks and pumps and
awnings and such things don’t just happen.”
“Well, I suppose she just doesn’t stop to think,” mused Laurie.
“And I hope she won’t. It would be fierce if she got insulted and went
to the poor-farm after all!”
“Oh, she wouldn’t do that!” declared Polly in horror. After a
moment she added: “I’ll just bet you anything, Laurie, that she did
notice and that she means to ask! She’s just waiting until she can
speak to you alone, I believe.”
Laurie groaned. “Then she’s never going to get the chance,” he
muttered. Polly looked doubtful.
CHAPTER XIX
LAURIE IS CORNERED
T he following afternoon saw the boys, minus Kewpie, escorting

Polly and Mae to the Pequot Queen. Mrs. Deane had begged off.
One mustn’t expect all April days to be fine, and this particular day
proved it. It had showered off and on during the forenoon, and now,
at half-past three, the rain was coming down hard and fast. The girls
wore rain-coats over their Sunday gowns, and Ned and Laurie were
draped in colorful yellow oilskins. Bob, in an old Mackinaw jacket,
huddled under the dripping eaves of one of the two umbrellas. It
seemed a particularly long way to the Pequot Queen under these
circumstances, and it was a rather bedraggled quintet that at last
filed into the cabin. Once there, however, discomforts were forgotten.
A fire in the stove defied the dampness of the outside world; a kettle
sang cozily; the white light that entered the open windows flashed on
polished surfaces; and the bowl of flowers on the table added a
cheerful note of color. And then there was the little hostess, all
smiles of welcome and concerned murmurs over dripping coats and
wet skirts.
The coats were laid aside quickly, and the visitors found seats,
Polly and Mae occupying the same arm-chair, since there were but
five chairs in the cabin and not even Laurie would have thought of
sitting on Miss Comfort’s immaculate blue and white spread! The
lack of a sixth chair troubled Miss Comfort considerably. Bob pointed
out that even had she possessed such a thing there wouldn’t have
been room for it and some one would have had to sit out on deck!
And Polly and Mae assured in chorus that they didn’t mind sitting
together, not one bit.
Miss Comfort was brimming over with pride and happiness.
Everything was too wonderful for words! And sleep— She held up
her hands in something almost like consternation. Why, she hadn’t
slept the way she had slept last night for years and years! She had
had her supper late because she had been so busy fixing things up,
and then she had sat at the window there for a long time watching
the lights on the water and on the further shore; and suddenly she
couldn’t keep her eyes open a minute longer, it had seemed, and
she had gone to bed and fallen right to sleep and slept and slept!
“It was so wonderful lying there and listening to the water lapping
against the boat that I tried my best to keep awake. But I couldn’t.
And then this morning when I awoke there was a beautiful fog and I
could hear bells sounding and now and then a great, deep fog-horn
on some boat. It was perfect! From my bed I can look out of the
windows and see the river, and when the sun came out for a little
while, quite early, it was beautiful!”
“Yes, ma’am,” agreed Laurie. “For myself, I never cared much for
fog-horns, but maybe the kind they have here are different. I’m
awfully glad you slept so well, though, and—and like it.”
“Like it! Oh, Mr. Laurie, I can never, never thank you enough for
finding this beautiful home for me!”
“Oh, that wasn’t anything,” muttered Laurie.
“Why, Laurie Turner,” exclaimed Polly, “it was wonderful! The rest
of us might have passed this boat a thousand times and never
thought of making it into a—an apartment!”
“Please, Polly dear,” Miss Comfort protested, “not an apartment! I
want it just what it is, a boat—my boat. You don’t think, do you”—she
appealed to Laurie—“that it would do to change the name? Of
course the Pequot Queen is very pretty, but I would so like to call it
after grandfather’s ship there.” Her gaze went to the oil-painting on
the wall.
“Don’t see why not,” said Laurie. “All we’d have to do would be to
paint out the old name. What was your grandfather’s ship called,
ma’am?”
“The Lydia W. Frye,” replied Miss Comfort raptly. “He named her
after my grandmother. She was one of the New Jersey Fryes.”
Laurie had a slight fit of coughing, which he recovered from so
abruptly, when he encountered Ned’s scowl, that he nearly choked.
“A nice name,” declared Ned sternly. “I’m sure we could change the
letters on the bow.”
“Oh, now I don’t believe I’d want you to go to all that trouble,” said
Miss Comfort. “I’ll just call it the Lydia W. Frye to myself, and that will
do quite well. Now I’m going to give you some tea.”
There were some cookies and sweet crackers with it, and for
these the hostess apologized. She hadn’t had time to do any baking
yet, she explained, and Brose had got these at the store for her last
evening. To-morrow, however, she was going to get to work, for she
had several orders that just had to be filled at once. It was after the
first cup of tea—and it did seem that Miss Comfort’s tea was very,
very different from any other tea, tasting, as Ned put it, like tea
instead of leather—that Laurie looked inquiringly at his brother and
Ned nodded and the twins arose and stood with their backs to the
door. Then Ned bowed and announced: “Original poetical
composition by the Turner Brothers entitled—”
He paused and looked at Laurie. “What is it entitled?” he
demanded. Laurie shook his head.
“We forgot to entitle it.”
“Entitled,” continued Ned, “entitled ‘Ode.’”
Polly clapped delightedly, and Bob inquired facetiously, “How
much?” The twins bowed in unison, and Ned recited the first line and
Laurie the second, after which they again alternated.
“O Pequot Queen, your stormy voyaging ’s o’er.

No more you’ll brave the wave’s and wind’s
discomfort.
Here, nestled ’gainst a peaceful, kindly shore,
You’re parlor, bedroom, bath for our Miss Comfort!”
Applause was loud and prolonged. The twins bowed repeatedly,

their hands on their hearts, their eyes languishing gratitude on the
appreciative audience.
“Why,” exclaimed Miss Comfort, with the tone of one making a
surprising discovery, “it was poetry!”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Laurie defensively, “but we warned you!”
Miss Comfort looked a trifle puzzled until Polly laughingly assured
her that she mustn’t mind Laurie, that he was always saying silly
things. Whereupon the little lady said disapprovingly: “You mustn’t
say that, Polly. I’m sure Mr. Laurie isn’t silly. Sometimes I don’t quite
understand him, my dear, but I’m sure he isn’t silly!”
“You’re a perfect dear!” replied Polly rapturously.
Laurie had seized his cap and Mae’s umbrella. “Back in five
minutes,” he said from the doorway.
“Hold on! Where are you going?” demanded Ned.
“Got to see Brose Wilkins a minute about—about something.”
“Well, make it peppy,” said Ned. “We’re not going to wait for you
long, old son.”
Laurie’s five minutes was more like fifteen, but he returned at last
and they said good-by and were almost on their way when Miss
Comfort sent Laurie’s heart down toward his shoes. “Mr. Laurie,” she
asked apologetically, “I wonder if you’d mind stopping in to see me
for a minute to-morrow.”
“Why—why, no, ma’am,” stammered Laurie. “I’d be pleased to.”
He exchanged meaning glances with Polly. Then Polly asked: “Why
don’t you stay now, Laurie, if Miss Comfort would like you to? We’ll
leave one of the umbrellas.”
Laurie viewed her in strong disapproval but accepted the situation.
“I don’t need any umbrella, though,” he said sadly. “I’ve got my coat,
and it isn’t raining so hard now.” He and Miss Comfort watched the
others depart, and then she motioned to a chair.
“Won’t you sit down, please?” she asked. Laurie sat down, but on
the extreme edge of the chair as though to lessen the space
between him and the door. “You see,” Miss Comfort went on after a
pause, “I’ve wanted to ask you ever since Wednesday how you were
doing all this, but I didn’t like to when the others were around. Now I
do wish you’d tell me, please.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Laurie gulped. “What—was it you wanted to know,
ma’am?”
“Why, who has—has met the expense of all the changes and
improvements you have made here, Mr. Laurie.”
“Oh,” said Laurie. “Oh! Well, you see, Miss Comfort, we haven’t
done so much after all. Now, you take that hanging lamp. Mrs.
Deane had that and wasn’t using it—”
“Yes, I know about the lamp,” interrupted Miss Comfort gently, “but
there’s that sink and the awning and—and so many, many things.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Laurie glanced longingly at the doorway. “Well, now,
you’d be surprised how little things like that cost. You take that stove-
piping, Miss Comfort. Maybe you thought that was new pipe, but it
wasn’t. It was second-hand. We just shined it up, you see!” Laurie
waved an all-encompassing hand. “Same way with the other things
—more or less.”
“That sink isn’t second hand, is it?” she asked.
“Well, no, ma’am, not the sink.” Laurie smiled engagingly. “But
sinks aren’t expensive. I was surprised, honest, I was, ma’am, when
we got the price on that! Why, seems like things don’t cost half what
they did a couple of years ago!”
“Mr. Laurie,” said Miss Comfort firmly, sitting very straight in her
chair and looking at him earnestly, “you shouldn’t try to deceive me. I
know that you and the others have spent a great deal of money, and
I’d feel horribly if I thought it was all yours. Now, please tell me.”
“Well—well, it’s like this. We did put in a few dollars, Miss Comfort,
but not enough to mention, and we were so glad to do it that you
oughtn’t to care a mite. Then—then two or three other folks, grown-
ups, you understand, wanted to help out, and there was quite a good
deal to be done, and so we took the money and promised not to tell
who’d given it. You see, Miss Comfort, they wanted to see you
comfortable here. And they were folks who could afford to do it, you
know. And so—well, that’s how it was,” Laurie concluded, observing
Miss Comfort anxiously.
“Thank you for telling me,” she said. “If you promised not to
divulge the names of the people who were so kind, I shan’t expect
you to. After all—” But she stopped and was silent a moment. Then,
“I’ve always said that I would never accept charity,” she went on
musingly, “but—well, I don’t know. Maybe I haven’t any right to be
proud. Then, somehow, this doesn’t seem so—so degrading. It
seems more like—well, just kindness, don’t you think so?”
“Yes, I do,” agreed Laurie emphatically. “And that’s just what it is,
ma’am.”
“I don’t feel about it as I would have a few years ago, anyhow,”
said Miss Comfort thoughtfully. Then she smiled. “Thanks for telling
me, Laurie. You don’t mind my calling you just that, do you? You’ve
been so—so— Won’t you have some more cookies?”
“No, ma’am, thank you.” Laurie felt that after going through the last
few minutes he deserved a whole plate of cookies, but he resisted
the temptation. Too many cookies weren’t good for a fellow who
hoped—sometimes—to be a catcher!
He was so relieved at the outcome of the talk that he didn’t realize
it was pouring harder than it had poured all day until he had turned
into Ash Street. When he did, he gave up the idea of joining the
others at the Widow’s and headed as straight as Orstead’s
wandering streets would let him head for East Hall, arriving there
extremely wet despite his oilskin coat. Sounds told him that many of
the fellows had already returned, and at the head of the first flight he
encountered Elk Thurston and his room-mate, Jim Hallock, coming
down. Hallock said, “Hello, Nod,” and then Elk asked: “How’s the
great pitcher coming on? Going to spring him on us pretty soon?”
Laurie said, “Not for another week or so, Elk,” and heard Elk
laughing as he and Jim went down.
A little later, when Ned and Kewpie arrived in No. 16, Laurie held
their undivided attention.
Monday morning and recitations once more. Monday afternoon
and baseball practice again. Things went well on the field, for the
candidates for the team had returned with renewed ambitions.
Besides, there was a game with Benson High School two days later,
and that was something to work for. Laurie managed to hit the ball
on the nose every time he stood at the batting-net, and later on, in
the five-inning practice game, he caught for an inning and, so far as
he could discern, didn’t do so badly.
Back in No. 16 at half-past five, he found Kewpie awaiting him,
Kewpie looking disheveled, weary, but triumphant. “I’ve got it!” he
announced excitedly before Laurie was well through the door. “I’ve
got the hang of it at last! That guy’s a corker, Nod, and he says I’ll
know as much about it as he does in another month!”
“Restrain your enthusiasm, Kewpie,” urged Laurie. “No use telling
the whole dormitory about it. These walls aren’t awfully thick, and I
can hear Elk tramping around up-stairs like a hippopotamus right
now.” But Laurie looked very much pleased and settled himself to
hear Kewpie’s gladsome tidings. And when Ned came in a little later
he heard them all over again, and after Kewpie had reluctantly torn
himself away the twins agreed that, even allowing for a slight
exaggeration of the facts as set forth by their late visitor, stock in the
Association for the Reclamation of Kewpie Proudtree had advanced
many points. The next afternoon the lady members of that
association were also taken into the secret, and there was much
rejoicing.
Polly and Mae learned the news at Bob’s tennis tea, for that long
heralded affair was at last taking place. The court was finished and
marked, the new creamy-white net was up, and, near at hand, a
wicker table bore the paraphernalia of afternoon tea. Practice kept
Laurie away until well after five, and Kewpie was missing for a time,
too, but Ned and George Watson and Hop Kendrick and Hal Pringle
and half a dozen other boys were there from the start. The gentler
sex was represented by Polly, Mae, and Bob’s aunt, the latter
presiding at the tea-table. Bob beat George Watson, 6 to 4, in an
exhibition set, and then Mae and Hal Pringle played Polly and Hop
Kendrick. After that there was tea and sandwiches and cake, and
then Bob took on Hal and Lee, and the set went to 9 to 7 before Bob
finally broke through on Hop’s service and won. The court was all
that Bob’s fondest hope had pictured. Mr. Starling arrived before the
party broke up and went through three games with Mae to the delight
of the audience, by that time swelled with the arrival of Kewpie and
Laurie.
Benson won from Hillman’s the next afternoon, 13 to 7. The home
team played rather ragged ball in the field, although the pitching of
George Pemberton and Nate Beedle was satisfactory enough. Nate
relieved Pemberton in the fifth inning, too late to prevent three runs
that put the visitors well in the lead. Laurie saw the game from the
bench, for Cas Bennett wore the mask from start to finish.
On Saturday afternoon Hillman’s met Tudor Hall School and
played a much steadier game. The Blue dislodged the opposing
pitcher in the third inning and put the game safely away with six runs.
Later four more were added, and the total of ten was more than
enough to win, even though Tudor Hall staged a rally in the first of
the ninth and hit Croft, who had succeeded Pemberton in the
seventh, to all corners of the field and got three runners across the
plate before Pat Browne, in right field, pulled down a fly and ended
the fracas. Again Laurie was a non-combatant, although Elk
Thurston caught during the final two innings and behaved rather well
during that hectic ninth.
The following afternoon Ned, as self-appointed secretary and
treasurer, rendered an accounting of the Pequot Queen fund,
showing a balance in the treasury of $1.42. All bills had been paid,
and the question of disposing of the balance came before the
meeting. Kewpie’s suggestion was typical.
“Pay it to Miss Comfort,” he said, “and we’ll trade it out in cake!”
“It isn’t ours,” Ned reminded him sternly. “Besides it’s not for you to
be thinking of cake, old dear.”
It was Polly’s suggestion that was finally adopted. They would give
the vast sum to Brose Wilkins to be used for the purchase of flower-
seeds for the boxes and beds. That momentous question settled,
they set forth to call at the Pequot Queen, or, as Laurie reminded
them they should now call the boat, the Lydia W. Frye.
April became May, and the Hillman’s School nine went on playing
Wednesday and Saturday games, losing not quite as often as it won.
Laurie twice donned the mask in contests and did as well, perhaps a
bit better, than he had expected to. He did very well at receiving the
ball from the pitcher, and he was remarkably steady at all times, but
he was weak when it came to holding the runners on bases, his
heaves to second being erratic, to say the least. At bat, however, he
was improving fast, and when May was a fortnight old there was not
much to choose between him and Elk Thurston as a catcher,
although possibly the latter’s greater age and size inspired more
confidence. Perhaps Coach Mulford thought so, for Elk was given
more chances than Laurie behind the bat.
When Hillman’s went to play Benson, most of the school
accompanied the team. Polly and Mae went, too, escorted by Ned
and George Watson. Hillman’s won, but not until the tenth inning,
and then by 3 to 2. Nate Beedle pitched fine ball that day. Hillman’s
returned to Orstead tired but happy.
Just a week later Polly celebrated her sixteenth birthday with a
party attended by Mae, Ned, Bob, Kewpie, and, since the affair was
held in the forenoon, Laurie. And, of course, Mrs. Deane was
present. Miss Comfort had been invited and in lieu of her presence
had provided a gorgeous birthday cake. Antoinette, wearing a new
pink ribbon that exactly matched her pink nose and ears, and
Towser, the cat, may also said to have attended. Polly received
many presents and was very bright of eye and very happy.
The celebration continued in the afternoon when the entire party
attended the game with Cole’s School, although, Laurie, of course,
did not sit with the others in the stand but watched the nine tragic
innings from the bench. Nate Beedle had a bad day; Croft, who
succeeded him, was far worse; and Pemberton alone of the pitching
staff showed any class. Pemberton got through the final two innings
without allowing a hit, but the damage was already done. Cole’s won
by the scandalous score of 16 to 3! Polly remarked, a trifle
unreasonably, that she thought, since it was her birthday, Hillman’s
might have won!
Rain caused the cancellation of the game with Highland the next
Wednesday, and Laurie accompanied Kewpie on his mysterious
pilgrimage to the home of Brose Wilkins. Those pilgrimages had
been made daily, excepting Sunday for about a month now, and
never once, rain or shine, had Kewpie sought to avoid them.
Whatever it was that kept the two boys on the dilapidated Wilkins
premises for more than an hour this Wednesday afternoon, it must
have been something important, for the rain never ceased for a
moment during that time, and, knowing Kewpie as we do, it seems
fair to assume that only an important mission could have kept him
from the snug window-seat of No. 15 East Hall on such a day.
Returning, their way took them within a few yards of the Pequot
Queen. The river beyond looked gray and sullen; the rain was falling
steadily and remorselessly; the new paint of the transformed ferry
boat gleamed with moisture. But from the smoke-pipe in the roof a
cheerful trail of gray ascended, and at the windows the blue and
white curtains shone cozily. Once they saw the small, erect form of
Miss Comfort, white-aproned, pass a casement and, or so Kewpie
solemnly averred, heard the sound of a faintly sung song. There was
such an atmosphere of warmth and hominess and cheer about the
quaint abode that Kewpie lagged noticeably and would have
welcomed a suggestion from his companion that they stop a moment
and say “Hello” to the occupant. But it was close to supper-time and
Laurie went sternly on, refusing to notice Kewpie’s deep sigh.
They reached the entrance of the dormitory just as Ned got there.
Ned carried his golf-bag and was very wet indeed. Laurie viewed him
commiseratingly. “You poor forlorn fish,” he said. “Don’t tell me
you’ve been playing golf a day like this!”
“Sure have,” answered Ned cheerfully. “Won, too. Had Peyton
three up on the seventh, too, old son.”
“Well, you certainly are a nut! Didn’t either of you know it was
raining?”
“Didn’t you?” countered Ned. “Look at your own shoes!”
“We,” replied Laurie with dignity, “were engaged in a sensible and
important occupation, not merely amusing ourselves!”
“Were, eh?” Ned grinned. “What important part did you play in it?”
“I,” began Laurie, “contributed my—er—my—”
“He chased the ball,” chuckled Kewpie as he disappeared to No.
15.

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Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary

Writing in the Early Modern World

This volume originates from an international research network, ‘Textual

Introduction: Literary and Diplomatic Cultures in the

9. Diplomatic Knowledge on Display: Foreign Affairs in the

13.1 James VI/I to Sultan Ahmed I, 17 January 1617 206

xiv Notes on Contributors

Tracey A. Sowerby and Joanna Craigwood

2 Tracey A. Sowerby and Joanna Craigwood

and [. . .] the administration of high offices’.3 The authors of other diplomatic

3 Gentili, De legationibus, II. 159–61.

Literary and Diplomatic Cultures 3

ambassador, whom he described as ‘rather a Iester or Iugler then a Person of any

10 Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 300, 334.

4 Tracey A. Sowerby and Joanna Craigwood

Literary and Diplomatic Cultures 5

performances bound up with diplomatic honour and shame.25 The humanist

As the web of diplomatic discourse informed by humanist intellectual culture

6 Tracey A. Sowerby and Joanna Craigwood

between these spheres.33 Timothy Hampton first compellingly demonstrated the

33 Hampton, Fictions of Embassy, 12. 34 Ibid., 6–72.

Literary and Diplomatic Cultures 7

academia. Instead, this collection invites readers to make comparisons between

8 Tracey A. Sowerby and Joanna Craigwood

Literary and Diplomatic Cultures 9

10 Tracey A. Sowerby and Joanna Craigwood

contributed to the construction of international relationships.56 Moreover, symbolic

56 William Roosen, ‘Early Modern Diplomatic Ceremonial: A Systems Approach’, JMH, 52

Literary and Diplomatic Cultures 11

conversational engagement between literary and historical scholars and approaches

12 Tracey A. Sowerby and Joanna Craigwood

The importance of oratory, performance, poetic composition, wide reading, and

Literary and Diplomatic Cultures 13

very foundations of Indian diplomacy in the pre-Mughal epic Mahabharata.62 Part I

14 Tracey A. Sowerby and Joanna Craigwood

Literary and Diplomatic Cultures 15

16 Tracey A. Sowerby and Joanna Craigwood

Literature can work as a form of cultural diplomacy because it invites readers to

Literary and Diplomatic Cultures 17

exchange and collection of books.76 Existing work on the literary productions

18 Tracey A. Sowerby and Joanna Craigwood

Literary and Diplomatic Cultures 19

texts—when constructing their analyses of early modern international relations.

80 On epistolary etiquette see Giora Sternberg, ‘Epistolary Ceremonial: Corresponding Status at

20 Tracey A. Sowerby and Joanna Craigwood

Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger have highlighted.82 Their interconnectedness is evident

Literary and Diplomatic Cultures 21

Origin Myths in Ambassadorial Handbooks 27

GENTILI ON THE ANTIQUITY OF EMBASSY

B ehold the Pequot Queen at ten o’clock Saturday morning!

T he following afternoon saw the boys, minus Kewpie, escorting

“O Pequot Queen, your stormy voyaging ’s o’er.

Applause was loud and prolonged. The twins bowed repeatedly,

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13.1 James VI/I to Sultan Ahmed I, 17 January 1617 206