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