During the early modern period, hundreds of Turks and Moors traded in English and Welsh ports, dazzled English society with exotic cuisine and Arabian horses, and worked small jobs in London, while the "Barbary Corsairs" raided coastal towns and, if captured, lingered in Plymouth jails or stood trial in Southampton courtrooms. In turn, Britons fought in Muslim armies, traded and settled in Moroccan or Tunisian harbor towns, joined the international community of pirates in Mediterranean and Atlantic outposts, served in Algerian households and ships, and endured captivity from Salee to Alexandria and from Fez to Mocha. In Turks, Moors, and Englishmen, Nabil Matar vividly presents new data about Anglo-Islamic social and historical interactions. Rather than looking exclusively at literary works, which tended to present unidimensional stereotypes of Muslims—Shakespeare's "superstitious Moor" or Goffe's "raging Turke," to name only two—Matar delves into hitherto unexamined English prison depositions, captives' memoirs, government documents, and Arabic chronicles and histories. The result is a significant alternative to the prevailing discourse on Islam, which nearly always centers around ethnocentrism and attempts at dominance over the non-Western world, and an astonishing revelation about the realities of exchange and familiarity between England and Muslim society in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. Concurrent with England's engagement and "discovery" of the Muslims was the "discovery" of the American Indians. In an original analysis, Matar shows how Hakluyt and Purchas taught their readers not only about America but about the Muslim dominions, too; how there were more reasons for Britons to venture eastward than westward; and how, in the period under study, more Englishmen lived in North Africa than in North America. Although Matar notes the sharp political and colonial differences between the English encounter with the Muslims and their encounter with the Indians, he shows how Elizabethan and Stuart writers articulated Muslim in terms of Indian, and Indian in terms of Muslim. By superimposing the sexual constructions of the Indians onto the Muslims, and by applying to them the ideology of holy war which had legitimated the destruction of the Indians, English writers prepared the groundwork for orientalism and for the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conquest of Mediterranean Islam. Matar's detailed research provides a new direction in the study of England's geographic imagination. It also illuminates the subtleties and interchangeability of stereotype, racism, and demonization that must be taken into account in any responsible depiction of English history.

and Malta. From the first non-European description of Queen Elizabeth I to early accounts of Florence and Pisa in Arabic, from Tunisian descriptions of the Morisco expulsion in 1609 to the letters of a Moroccan Armenian ambassador in London, the translations of the book's second half draw on the popular and elite sources that were available to Arabs in the early modern period." "Matar notes that the Arabs of the Maghrib and the Mashriq were eager to engage Christendom, despite wars and rivalries, and hoped to establish routes of trade and alliances through treaties and royal marriages. However, the rise of an intolerant and exclusionary Christianity and the explosion of European military technology brought these advances to an end. In conclusion, Matar details the decline of Arab-Islamic power and the rise of Britain and France." --Book Jacket.

Featuring twenty one newly-commissioned essays, A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion demonstrates how today's globalization is the result of a complex and lengthy historical process that had its roots in England's mercantile and cross-cultural interactions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. An innovative collection that interrogates the global paradigm of our period and offers a new history of globalization by exploring its influences on English culture and literature of the early modern period. Moves beyond traditional notions of Renaissance history mainly as a revival of antiquity and presents a new perspective on England's mercantile and cross-cultural interactions with the New and Old Worlds of the Americas, Africa, and the East, as well with Northern Europe. Illustrates how twentieth-century globalization was the result of a lengthy and complex historical process linked to the emergence of capitalism and colonialism Explores vital topics such as East-West relations and Islam; visual representations of cultural 'others'; gender and race struggles within the new economies and cultures; global drama on the cosmopolitan English stage, and many more

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.

This collection of essays explores the diverse ways in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries experienced and imagined Europe. The book charts the aspects of European politics and culture which interested Renaissance travellers, thus mapping the context within which Shakespeare's plays with European settings would have been received. Chapters cover the politics of continental Europe, the representation of foreigners on the English stage, the experiences of English travellers abroad, Shakespeare's reading of modern European literature, the influence of Italian comedy, his presentation of Moors from Europe's southern frontier, and his translation of Europe into settings for his plays.

No further information has been provided for this title.

Tune up your knowledge of the Arab and Muslim worlds with this easy to read text. The Arab-American Handbook contains useful reference material and comment by a wide variety of participants and observers. The book includes: a thumbnail history; the essentials of Islam; social insights & cultural norms. The perfect tool for : teachers, employers, travelers, law enforcement. Government workers and the general public will find that they can quickly penetrate the stereotypes and misconceptions to appreciate the tenor and nuance of Arab and Muslim life. Without a better grasp of this subject, the citizens of liberal democracies are unsafe at home and at a disadvantage in the global competition for hearts and minds.