EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

As we assembled the articles for Mediterranean Studies 33.1, we were reminded of Bruno Latour’s effort to define terms in the actor-network theory he spearheaded. “It is crucial for the definition,” he maintained, “. . . that what circulates and what makes the circulation be both co-determined and transformed.”1 The articles in this issue of the journal are studies of the mutually modifying dynamic of actors and networks in and beyond the Mediterranean.The authors of the first set of the following articles study this dynamic from the perspective of the actor. In his article “For an Iconology of the Emotions,” Paolo Tabacchini introduces Aby Warburg, the German art historian, as a cultural actor whose theory of the pathosformel posited that, through the “afterlife of Antiquity,” it is possible for the individual and collective imagination to link images of any age, type, size, and origin into a robust iconological network. The article proposes an example of Warburg’s imagination network in a study that links images in Angelo Poliziano’s late-fifteenth-century poem “Le Stanze per la Giostra” to images in paintings by Sandro Botticelli. Bavjola Shatro considers the oxymoron of the powerless actor in her explication of “Negative Space” by the Albanian poet Luljeta Lleshanaku. This actor, systematically emptied of all individual substance during the Communist regime in Albania, spins from negativity a network that sustains the vital links of nobody, nothing and nowhere in an ethical remnant of selfhood.The second set of articles examines the operation of networks in the Mediterranean. In “The City of Algiers in Yasmina Khadra’s Noir Fiction,” Fernando Gomes studies the urban center as a network linking crime and morality in the noir fiction of Algerian author Yasmina Khadra. In Khadra’s novels, Algiers exists less as a city than as a network of weakened political and social institutions that binds all actors, both good and bad, in a never-ending and always new struggle for survival. Finally, Zeynep Arslan-Ҫalik examines the role of ethnic affiliations in the formation of economic networks in “Forging Cosmopolitan Networks: The Role of Muslim- Ottoman Merchants in Trieste’s Mediterranean Trade Network in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries.” Drawing on archival material, the author brings to light the role of Muslim merchants in developing the port of Trieste as a node in the Mediterranean trade network that linked the Habsburg and Ottoman empires.Four splendid book reviews round out this issue. In her review of A Companion to the Renaissance in Southern Italy, Sarah Davis-Secord notes that this publication, edited by Bianca De Divitiis, draws long overdue attention—with support from recognized experts in numerous specialized fields—to Italy’s southern half. Botanical Icons: Critical Practices of Illustration in the Premodern Mediterranean by Andrew Griebeler is reviewed by Claire Banks who observes with pleasure that the book dispels the notion of premodern illustration as an uncritical practice of copying. John Hunt reviews Ordering Customs: Ethnographic Thought in Early Modern Venice by Kathryn Taylor. This book contributes to the growing body of scholarship on global exchange and ethnography in early modern Europe. War, Communication and the Politics of Culture in Early Modern Venice by Anastasia Stourati, reviewed here by Karen-edis Barzman, sounds the final note of the articles in this issue, giving media its due in bringing home to the seventeenth-century citizens of la Serenissima the far-off War of Morea. All in all, these articles and book reviews make it clear that actors and networks are constantly and endlessly bound up in each other to produce the Mediterranean.