"Moving Textuality" in Early Modern Europe

This chapter relies on some of the methodological tools that have emerged in the debate on “mobility and humanities” to reassess the meaning of mobility in the pre-modern world in the field of textuality. By focusing on the mobility of library catalogs in early modern Europe, this chapter first discusses the tension between the thickness of mobility (the quantity of objects and actors in motion) and the cultural meaning of this mobility. The movement and exchange of book lists in early modern Europe and beyond shows the inherent connection between physical mobility and the construction of new meanings. It also shows the extent to which, in the past as in the present, the mobility of people and objects across space has been only one ingredient in the process of knowledge construction.