What did it mean to be a stranger in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England? How were other nations, cultures, and religions perceived? What happened when individuals moved between languages, countries, religions, and spaces? Following the model of Raymond Williams’s classic Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), Keywords of Identity, Race, and Human Mobility analyses a selection of terms that were central to the conceptualisation of identity, race, migration, and transculturality in the early modern period. In many cases, the concepts, preconceptions, and debates that they embody – or sometimes subsume – came to play formative roles in the articulation of identity, rights, and power in subsequent periods. Together, the essays in this volume provide an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the development of issues of identity, belonging, and human mobility.

What did it mean in practice to be a ‘go-between’ in the early modern world? How were such figures perceived in sixteenth and seventeenth century England? And what effect did their movement between languages, countries, religions and social spaces – whether enforced or voluntary – have on the ways in which people navigated questions of identity and belonging? Lives in Transit in Early Modern England is a work of interdisciplinary scholarship which examines how questions of mobility and transculturality were negotiated in practice in the early modern world. Its twenty-four case studies cover a wide range of figures from different walks of life and corners of the globe, ranging from ambassadors to Amazons, monarchs to missionaries, translators to theologians. Together, the essays in this volume provide an invaluable resource for people interested in questions of race, belonging, and human identity.