British Encounters with Ottoman Minorities in the Early Seventeenth Century

British travellers regarded all inhabitants of the seventeenth-century Ottoman empire as 'slaves of the sultan', yet they also made fine distinctions between them. This book provides the first comprehensive cultural historical account of how British travellers understood the non-Muslim minority peoples they encountered in the Ottoman empire, and of how they perceived and described them in the mediating shadow of the Turks. In doing so it seeks to change our perceptions of the British encounter with the Ottomans by exploring the entangled identities of the Ottoman subjects in the English imagination, de-centering the image of the 'Terrible Turk' and Islam.

Auteur

Eva Johanna Holmberg is an Academy Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, History and Art Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and a visiting research fellow at the School of History, Queen Mary University of London, UK. Her research interests include the cultural history of travel and cultural encounter in the Ottoman Empire and Levant, the depiction of ethnic, racial, and religious difference in early modern English culture, and the many modes and entanglements of travel writing and life writing in the seventeenth century. Eva's previous publications include Jews in the Early Modern English Imagination - A Scattered Nation (2012).

Contenu

IntroductionChapter 1 - Scattered nations: Jews and Greeks

Chapter 2 - Eastern Christians

Chapter 3 - Viewing and addressing women

Chapter 4 - Free Franks and visiting Westerners

Conclusion