Kathryn Gucer

This page reflects a scholar's association with the Folger Institute. Independent Scholar, Chicago, IL

Long-term fellowship

Revolution across the Channel: Cross-Cultural Information Exchange between Early Modern England and Europe (NEH, 2012-2013)

This book project examines how information networks emerged between exiles and their contacts in England, France, Germany, and the Low Countries in the late sixteenth- and seventeenth- century. In this period, a series of social upheavals—including the Thirty Years War, the English Revolution, and the Fronde—uprooted groups of political and religious refugees and transplanted them across multiple borders. These far-flung communities of Huguenots, English Royalists, Recusants (Catholics), Quakers, and others cultivated complex webs of routes, strategies, and materials for transmitting information back home and abroad. They formed unexpected and unconventional bonds with writers, readers, translators, and information entrepreneurs usually relegated to the backstage of international politics. Joining together methods in book history, post-colonial studies, and the history of information, my project illuminates exile and exchange in texts marked by the multiple processes involved in creating and using them. These texts—including Denis Cailloué’s French translation of Eikon Basilike and Dutch editions of French polemical pamphlets from the Fronde—result from a strange mix of purposeful collaboration, haphazard alteration, and skewed reception. They are often fractured and self-conflicted, and their incoherence embodies the uneven process of formation by which the exile groups that created and shared them came into being. Specifically, each chapter investigates how two kinds of people came together in these exchange networks: exiles and expatriates with pre-existing group identities such as English royalists (including Thomas Hobbes and William Cavendish), on the one hand, and disparate people outside or only partially within these groups who served as the practical links to information resources in their host societies and abroad (including Marin Mersenne, William Dugard, a.k.a. Guillaume du Gard, and Jacques Cailloué), on the other.

Blogs

Collation Guest-post: "The Folger’s Mazarinades: Libraries within Libraries"