Utopian Cosmopolitanism (Forum: English Cosmopolitanism and the Early Modern Moment‪)‬

BORROWED FROM THE ancient Greek, the early modern English "cosmopolitan" or "cosmopolite" designated a "citizen" of the "one mysticall citie universall," as one of the extracts collected in Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations uses it to describe the "perfect Cosmographer." "Hard word" books in the seventeenth century explained to the perplexed that it meant "citizen of the world." We know that some English men so designated themselves at the time, and even rendered London "Cosmopoli," but it seems pertinent to ask, given the word's association with citizenry, what it might have meant for women. (1) That is, if substantial cultural impediments (legally it was, in theory, possible) prevented English women from becoming citizens of London for the most part--indeed, barred them from being recognized as independent political subjects of any kind, except in exceptional circumstances--to what extent could they imagine themselves "citizens" of the world? (2) I will suggest they could in a very specific sense: utopianly. The cosmopolitanism that I will be examining here, in other words, was fulfilled "nowhere," but it can be traced as an incipient desire in women's writing, though more in hints, textual disruption, and contradictions than in positive description. (3) In its most radical form, of course, men's cosmopolitanism was necessarily utopian, as well, as we shall see; however, as a desire, utopian cosmopolitanism was arguably more potent--and imaginable--for women because their social roles were more circumscribed than those of their male counterparts in each class, and this structural subordination made it more likely for them to long for participation in a universal community that exceeded local constraints without simply collapsing them into a preexisting male normativity, as the default understandings of cosmopolitanism in early modern England demanded. Thus, while the utopian cosmopolitanism I have in mind did--and does--not exist, I will suggest that aspiration to it served as a hitherto unexplored incentive for women to produce translations, one of the most prominent forms of early women's writing. Typically this highly active site of female production is explained in negative terms: public display by women being considered unseemly, women migrated to a site of publication deemed more socially acceptable because, as John Florio put it, it was "delivered at the second hand." (4) I do not dispute this position entirely, but think it is incomplete; women's translations often indicate, at the very least, that a virtue was made of necessity. They were a means by which women could aspire to a more expansive world--a cosmopolitan conversation--as women, even if they did so only partially conscious of disrupting the status quo. Margaret Tyler, for example, who audaciously translated a Spanish romance into English in 1578, does seem to dismiss her own role as secondary ("the invention, disposition, trimming, & what els in this story, is wholly an other mans, my part none therein but the translation"), but she goes on to describe translation in an unmistakably transculturally engaged, or cosmopolitan, way--as "giving entertainment to a stranger, before this time unacquainted with our country guise"--and to defend a woman's fitness for such a task. (5)