Programme
If you wish to participate in all or part of this workshop, kindly register at events@roma.uio.no
About the workshop's topic:
In recent years, the new importance attributed to the biographies of objects and their global circulation has drawn increasing attention to the phenomenon of their physical transportation – in other words, to the complex sets and modes of actions required to move an object from the point of creation to its final destination.
Inspired by the growing body of scholarship, this workshop aims to develop new tools to perceive, measure and interpret the movement of things, by looking specifically at the way physical transportation has been described, inspected, and dissected in early modern sources. The material under scrutiny here may take different forms, from diaries, letters, and other prosopographical accounts recording movement in its making; to archival materials that track unusual patterns of transportation and physical delivery; to letters, treatises, and even guides or handbooks reporting ex post facto descriptions of mobility.
This workshop intends to probe this vast collection of sources in order to tease out how mobility was described and conceptualized, surveyed and explored in the long early modern period (approximately from 1350 to 1800), before the rise of modern logistics. In short, it addresses from all angles the narrative potential of mobility: how describing movement “makes a good story.”