Abstract
This collection of essays concerns the role of the Mediterranean in the development of an early modern English identity. It attempts to chart, through English literature, how the rest of the world helped the English define who they were and what place they held in that world. More specifically, most of the articles in this volume are about how the English mentally mapped a particular place—the Mediterranean—at a particular time—the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their authors set out to show that the Mediterranean propelled a developing English sense of self, a sense that lay at the core of English identity and British imperialism. The essays, in their examination of a series of specific works and approaches, make a strong case for this assessment.
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Notes
See, as examples of the growing literature on these plays, Gerald McLean, “On Turning Turk, or Trying To: National Identity in Robert Daborne’s A Christian turn’d Turke,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 29.2 (Winter 2003): 225–52
and Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
Gerald MacLean has coined the phrase “imperial envy” to characterize early modern English attitudes toward the Ottomans. He also suggests the term “Ottomanism” to distinguish English (and western European) relations with the East from the very different relationship suggested by the term Orientalism. See MacLean, “Performing East: English Captives in the Ottoman Maghreb,” Actes du Ier Congrès International sur Le Grande Bretagne et le Maghreb: Etat de Recherche et contacts culturels (Zaghouane, Tunisia: Fondation Temimi, 2001), p. 1.
Gülru Necipoğlu, “Süleyman the Magnificent and the Representation of Power in the Context of Ottoman-Hapburg-Papal Rivalry,” Art Bulletin 71.3 (1989): 401–27. Eric R. Dursteler has recently taken up the general ambivalence of Venice toward the Ottomans as well as the complexity of their relationship. See his “The Bailo in Constantinople: Crisis and Career in Venice’s Early Modern Diplomatic Corps,” Mediterranean Historical Review 16.2 (2001): 1–30; and “Commerce and Coexistence: Veneto-Ottoman Trade in the Early Modern Era,” Turcica 34 (2002): 105–33.
On which, see Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1650–1800 (New York: Pantheon, 2002;
and Daniel Vitkus, ed., Piracy, Slavery, and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
British Library, Egerton MS 2541, fos. 318–19. Over the next decade, Hyde, a fervent royalist, continued to use his understanding of the Ottoman world to stir trouble for the English, on which see Daniel Goffman, Britons in the Ottoman Empire, 1642–1660 (Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press, 1998), passim.
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© 2007 Goran V. Stanivukovic
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Goffman, D. (2007). Afterword. In: Stanivukovic, G.V. (eds) Remapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230601840_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230601840_15
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