Visible Strangers

Visible strangers is a collective work that rethinks the study of the identity categories that characterised the Mediterranean space in the early modern era.

The book's nine chapters consider new case studies, offering a diachronic overview on the management, expression and negotiation of diversity in early modern cities and how this evolved from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Central to the volume is the concept of visibility as a unique form of identity expression and as a valuable opportunity to access otherness and cultural negotiation. Through the analysis of case studies of Adriatic cities such as Zadar, Venice, Ancona and Dubrovnik; of Valletta's Grand Port; of the Italian and Iberian peninsulas; and of travel reports to Istanbul and Alexandria, the book offers an expanded view of the materiality of cultural affiliations in the early modern Mediterranean.

Each contribution offers a paradigm of historical and cultural phenomena related to coexistence, considered in the framework of a Mediterranean region as a system of microecologies connected by a shared history. This perspective provides the basis for discussing a Mediterranean model that can be usefully employed to investigate cultural pluralism in areas with similar characteristics, while overcoming the bias induced by Mediterraneanism.

Filomena Viviana Tagliaferri is a Lecturer of Early Modern History at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and a Research Fellow in Early Modern History and the Institute of Mediterranean Europe History of the Italian Research Council (ISEM-CNR)