The essays in this book analyze a range of genres and considers geographical areas beyond the Ottoman Empire to deepen our post-Saidian understanding of the complexity of real and imagined "traffic" between England and the "Islamic worlds" it encountered and constructed.

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: gut, University of Frankfurt (Main) (Institut für England- und Amerikastudien), course: Early Modern England & Islam 1560-1640, language: English, abstract: The "troubles" with Islam in today's Europe concerning legal and social issues are accompanied by stereotypical visions of the Islamic world. Stereotypes and prejudices play of course a certain role in every representation or vision of the Other. In regard to Islam they are, however, of a particularly long and rich history. Already after one century from its emergence Islam was seen as a danger to Christianity. John of Damascus granted already in 8th century a complete, though totally ignorant view of the Muslim civilization. Muhammad was depicted by him as an Antichrist and he declared Islam to be a conspiracy against Christianity. The medieval reception of Islam is shown very accurately in the famous Divina Comedia by Dante, where the reader finds Mohammed placed nowhere else but in hell: "(...) see how Mahomet is mangled! Before he goes Ali in tears, his face cleft from chin to forelock; and all the others thou seest here were in life sowers of scandal and schism and therefore are thus cloven". Untrue and unfair depictions of Islam in Europe are found in Catholic theology by Thomas Aquinas, who is still regarded by the Church as its most prominent philosopher. Ignorance about Islam may seem understandable as far as fear of religious challenge is concerned, since many critics of Islam felt it was their duty to defend the truth about God. Many of them depicted the Muslim culture in a completely wrong way because of the very fact that they had never been in real contact with that culture. More detailed investigations about what was behind the teachings would, however, needed to be based on direct encounter. Accounts on Islam based on personal experience would have been then at least more objective and

Early Modern England was obsessed with the 'turke'. Following the first Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1529 the printing presses brought endless prayer sheets, pamphlets and books concerning this 'infidel' threat before the public in the vernacular for the first time. As this body of knowledge increased, stimulated by a potent combination of domestic politics, further Ottoman incursions and trade, English notions of Islam and of the 'turke' became nuanced in a way that begins to question the rigid assumptions of traditional critical enquiry. New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England explores the ways in which print culture helped define and promulgate a European construction of 'Turkishness' that was nebulous and ever shifting. By placing in context the developing encounters between the Ottoman and Christian worlds, it shows how ongoing engagements reflected the nature of the 'Turke' in sixteenth century English literature. By offering readings of texts by artists, poets and playwrights - especially canonical figures like Kyd, Marlowe and Shakespeare - a bewildering variety of approaches to Islam and the 'turke' is revealed fundamentally questioning any dominant, defining narrative of 'otherness'. In so doing, this book demonstrates how continuing English encounters, both real and fictional, with Muslims complicated the notion of the 'Turke'. It also shows how the Anglo-Ottoman relationship - which was at its peak in the mid-1590s - was viewed with suspicion by Catholic Europe, particularly the apparent ritual and devotional similarities between England's reformed church and Islam. That the 'new turkes' were not Ottoman Muslims, but English Protestants, serves as a timely riposte to the decisive rhetoric of contemporary conflicts and modern scholarly assumption.

In this innovative study, Bernadette Andrea focuses on the contributions of women and their writings in the early modern cultural encounters between England and the Islamic world. She examines previously neglected material, such as the diplomatic correspondence between Queen Elizabeth I and the Ottoman Queen Mother Safiye at the end of the sixteenth century, and resituates canonical accounts, including Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's travelogue of the Ottoman empire at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Her study advances our understanding of how women negotiated conflicting discourses of gender, orientalism, and imperialism at a time when the Ottoman empire was hugely powerful and England was still a marginal nation with limited global influence. This book is a significant contribution to critical and theoretical debates in literary and cultural, postcolonial, women's, and Middle Eastern studies.

Shakespeare through Islamic Worlds investigates the peculiar absence of Islam and Muslims from Shakespeare’s canon. While many of Shakespeare’s plays were set in the Mediterranean, a geography occupied by Muslim empires and cultures, his work eschews direct engagement with the religion and its people. This erasure is striking given the popularity of this topic in the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. By exploring the limited ways in which Shakespeare uses Islamic and Muslim tropes and topoi, Ambereen Dadabhoy argues that Islam and Muslim cultures function as an alternate or shadow text in his works, ranging from his staged Mediterranean plays to his histories and comedies. By consigning the diverse cultures of the Islamic regimes that occupied and populated the early modern Mediterranean, Shakespeare constructs a Europe and Mediterranean freed from the presence of non-white, non-European, and non-Christian Others, which belied the reality of the world in which he lived. Focusing on the Muslims at the margins of Shakespeare’s works, Dadabhoy reveals that Islam and its cultures informed the plots, themes, and intellectual investments of Shakespeare’s plays. She puts Islam and Muslims back into the geographies and stories from which Shakespeare had evacuated them. This innovative book will be of interest to all those working on race, religion, global and cultural exchange within Shakespeare, as well as people working on Islamic, Mediterranean, and Asian studies in literature and the early modern period.

Co-published by: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies.

Explores the interactions between Britain and the Islamic world from 1558 to 1713, showing how much scholars, diplomats, traders, captives, travellers, clerics, and chroniclers were involved in developing and describing those interactions.