Movement and Mobility in the Early Modern World : An Introduction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Introduction offers an orientation to mobility themes emerging from the social sciences and considers how they can generate new understandings of the early modern world. It calls for integrating the study of different forms of mobility – embodied, local, global – and highlights the need to pay attention to the ‘quotidian mechanics’ of movement at all scales. It is structured around three themes: moving bodies; crossing borders; and networks, distance, and circulation. Keywords: circulation; trade; travel writing; global history; communication; transport From around 1450, Europe became more mobile and more connected – both internally and to the wider world – than ever before. The enhancement of transport and communication systems (road and river networks, the printing press, postal services); the growth of cities; the spread of “Renaissance” culture; the global expansion of trade, Christianity, and empires; and the ever-increasing movement of people and goods stimulated encounters and exchanges, conversions and conflicts. At the same time, the growth and acceleration of mobility spurred the development of policies and infrastructures that aimed to regulate and channel movement. In the words of Martin and Bleichmar, “the early modern period was uniquely liminal in so far as it opened up new horizons of movement and possibility, while simultaneously prompting the desire to establish boundaries, to demarcate and dominate.” The intersection and creative tension between these crosscurrents fundamentally shaped the lives, itineraries, and experiences of mobile individuals. They also left lasting traces on many other aspects of early modern life: on settled communities, on urban and rural landscapes, and on patterns of cultural formation. Our own age of hyper-mobility and instant connection – but also of pandemic lockdowns and escalating climate and refugee crises – is making us more sensitive to these complex and ambivalent dynamics in the past. Yet it is crucial to be aware not just of continuities between our day and the past but also of fundamental differences in the actual practice and experience of movement. As such, more attention can be given to what we might call the “quotidian mechanics” of early modern mobility: the material and physical experiences together with the systems, technologies, and practices that facilitated and impeded movement, whether on a local or a global scale.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".