Early Modern Hospitality aims, in the words of its editors, David B. Goldstein and Marco Piana, “to examine the complex world of hospitality as a fundamental element of early modern societies at large, with special emphasis on the English and Italian contexts” (18). The editors explain that many of the essays were first presented at the Toronto Renaissance and Reformation Colloquium in 2018 and acknowledge that “a collection of case studies like ours cannot provide a comprehensive overview of such an encompassing topic” (24). But this volume does offer a banquet of precise engagements, via theory and archival practice.
Mention of hospitality in early modern Europe would have brought the famous passage from Hebrews to mind: “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it” (KJV, 13:2). The injunction seems unambiguous enough, but Goldstein and Piana rightly echo the many modern scholars who have written about hospitality over the last forty years: “hospitality is anything but a comfortable value. It is dangerous and vexatious” (19).
Indeed, one of the strengths of this volume is that readers are invited to explore and juxtapose dangerous and vexatious hospitalities in a number of distinct settings and contexts, from Elena Brizio's analysis of a “disorganized, rough, almost neurotic” welcoming ceremony for Charles V to Hana Ferencová's fresh look at English travelers’ accounts of Bohemian hospitality. Readers of Church History will find the section devoted to “Piety at the Threshold (Ecclesiastical Hospitality)” particularly interesting.
