Mobility, Material Culture, and the Archive:A View from the Mediterranean

Over the past decades, research on early modern materiality has decidedly gone global, uncovering the trans-continental pathways of ceramics, feathers, or even coral. In parallel, the journeys of early modern people continue to captivate specialists of the first global age. Ironically, however, despite such interest in both material and human mobility, intersections between the trajectories of people and things have received little attention. Focusing on the Inquisition trial records of Domingo Fortún, an enslaved man from North Africa, and the Arabic talismans they enclose, this article contends that studying physical objects enclosed in archives can disrupt the artificial divide between the mobility of persons and things in historiography. Leaning on the unsettling presence of things in Inquisitorial records, it shows that human and non-human mobility were profoundly enmeshed in the eyes of sixteenth-century men and women, and should also be in how we now view motion in the early modern world.