This book explores perceptions of toleration and self-identity through an analysis of otherness’ real experience of Italian travellers, Catholic missionaries and Maltese proto-journalists within Mediterranean border-spaces. Employing a multidisciplinary approach, which integrates the analysis of original and unpublished archival documentation with early modern European travel literature, the book shows how fluid subjects and border groups adapted to new environments, often generating information that made the Ottomans and their system of values real and dignified to an Italian audience. The interdisciplinary combining of historical methodology with the tools of comparative literature, anthropology and folklore studies provides a fresh perspective on concepts of tolerance as experienced in the early modern Mediterranean.

This first volume of A Global Sourcebook in Protestant Political Thought provides a window into the early Protestant world, and the ways in which Protestants wrestled with politics and religion in the wake of the Reformation. This period saw political authorities and church hierarchies challenged and defended by scholars, clerics, and laypeople alike. The volume engages the full spectrum of Protestants, with reference to theology, geography, ethnicity, historical importance, socio-economic background, and gender. This diversity highlights how Protestants felt pulled towards differing political positions and used several maps to chart their course – conscience, custom, history, ecclesiastical tradition, and the laws of God, nature, nation, or community. On most important issues, Protestants lined up on opposing sides. Additionally, Catholic and Eastern Orthodox political thought, as well as interactions with Jewish and Muslim texts and thinkers, profoundly influenced different directions taken in the history of Protestant political thought. Even as our own time is fraught with deep disagreement and political polarisation, so too was early modern Europe, and we might read it in the anxieties, uncertainties, hopes, and expectations that the sources vividly express. This sourcebook will enrich both research and classroom teaching in politics, theology, and history, whether geared towards general political or religious history, or towards more specialised courses on colonialism, warfare, gender, race or religious diversity.

“Never before to my knowledge has the cross-fertilisation of Western and Islamic ideas been so encyclopedically documented as it is here. In reading Islam and the English Enlightenment, you will never see the relationship between Islam and the West in the same way again.” ROBERT F. SHEDI NGER Professor of Religion, Luther College “Dr. Zulfiqar Ali Shah’s Islam and the English Enlightenment is one of the most profoundly enlightening books I have read in years. Dr. Shah compellingly demonstrates that the thinkers of English Enlightenment were undeniably indebted to Islamic sciences and thought, and that the foundational principles of rationalist thought, scientific inquiry and religious toleration were deeply anchored in the Islamic tradition.” KHALED ABOU EL FADL Omar & Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law “This is a book that anyone interested in stepping outside a Eurocentric view of the rise of the West and of the modern age must read.” MICHAEL A. GILLESPIE Professor of Political Science & Philosophy, Duke University “Dr. Shah convincingly demonstrates the central role that Islam played in shaping the values and ideas of the Enlightenment reformers such as John Locke and Isaac Newton who had helped to produce the modern world.” GERALD MACLEAN Emeritus Professor, University of Exeter

Reconsidering the Mediterranean, appreciating and demarginalizing the peoples and cultures of this vast region, while considering the affinities and differences, is a valuable part of the process of unframing and reframing the concept of the Mediterranean. The authors of this volume follow Franco Cassano’s refusal of a sort of prêt-à-porter reality of cohabitation of cultures, introducing instead un’alternativa mediterranea, a world of multiple cultures that entails an ongoing learning and experiencing. The volume’s contributors use an interdisciplinary approach that mirrors the hybridity of the area and of the discipline, that is much more introspective and humanistic, more contemporary and inclusive.

This book considers the production of collective identity in Venice (Christian, civic-minded, anti-tyrannical), which turned on distinctions drawn in various fields of representation from painting, sculpture, print, and performance to classified correspondence. Dismemberment and decapitation bore a heavy burden in this regard, given as indices of an arbitrary violence ascribed to Venice’s long-time adversary, “the infidel Turk.” The book also addresses the recuperation of violence in Venetian discourse about maintaining civic order and waging crusade. Finally, it examines mobile populations operating in the porous limits between Venetian Dalmatia and Ottoman Bosnia and the distinctions they disrupted between “Venetian” and “Turk” until their settlement on farmland of the Venetian state. This occurred in the eighteenth century with the closing of the borderlands, thresholds of difference against which early modern “Venetian-ness” was repeatedly measured and affirmed.

The Triplex Confinium, or triple border, was an actual point in the proximity of the town of Knin in Croatia, between the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Venice after the peace treaty of Karlowitz in 1699. The Triplex Confinium, as an area and experience of living on the crossroads of different civilizations, cultures and religions in a long historical perspective, inspired an international research project focused upon the comparative history and intercultural approaches of borders and borderlands in Southeast Europe, where three distinctive political, cultural and confessional contexts encountered each other over the centuries. The Triplex Confinium is above all a metaphor of cultural challenges in the areas of multiple borderlands.

This is the first systematic scholarly study of the Ottoman experience of plague during the Black Death pandemic and the centuries that followed. Using a wealth of archival and narrative sources, including medical treatises, hagiographies, and travelers' accounts, as well as recent scientific research, Nükhet Varlik demonstrates how plague interacted with the environmental, social, and political structures of the Ottoman Empire from the late medieval through the early modern era. The book argues that the empire's growth transformed the epidemiological patterns of plague by bringing diverse ecological zones into interaction and by intensifying the mobilities of exchange among both human and non-human agents. Varlik maintains that persistent plagues elicited new forms of cultural imagination and expression, as well as a new body of knowledge about the disease. In turn, this new consciousness sharpened the Ottoman administrative response to the plague, while contributing to the makings of an early modern state.