Abstract
Recent scholarship on English relations with the Islamic world during the Elizabethan era has focused on exchange as a way to counter two persistent fallacies: the first, based on medieval anti-Islamic polemics and brought forward into modern “clash of civilization” diatribes, posits an unbridgeable gap between “East” and “West”; the second, drawn from anachronistic applications of the postcolonial critique epitomized by Edward Said’s Orientalism, assumes the West has always dominated the East.1 Seeking to remedy both views, Lisa Jardine’s influential cultural history, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (1996), situates Constantinople, renamed Istanbul after the Ottoman conquest of 1453, at the hub of a global network of exchange that constituted the European Renaissance in its cultural, as well as its mercantile, aspects. As she asserts, “in the panorama we are surveying of emerging influences on European culture, the cultural as well as the political might of the Ottomans plays a vital part.”2 With Jerry Brotton, she expands this focus in Global Interests: Renaissance Art Between East and West (2000), whose opening chapter, “Exchanging Identity: Breaching the Boundaries of Renaissance Europe, ” examines the Islamic influences on the Renaissance man’s self-fashioning.3 From this perspective, the Ottoman empire and other Islamic powers no longer seem absolutely “other” to western Christendom nor does the West invariably hold “the relative upper hand” in relation to them.4
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Notes
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© 2011 Charles Beem
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Andrea, B. (2011). Elizabeth I and Persian Exchanges. In: Beem, C. (eds) The Foreign Relations of Elizabeth I. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118553_8
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