The Dialectics of Orientalism in Early Modern Europe
October 7-8, 2011, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Levis Faculty Center
Roberto M. Dainotto (Duke University)
"Rhymes"
In this paper, I would like to go back to the Eighteenth-Century debate around the issue of an Arab origin of European literature with a particular focus on the “Arab Theory” of the origin of rhyme. Besides attempting to reconstruct the debate — which begins with Dante and Petrarch, acquires consistency in the Sixteenth Century in the quarrel between Arabists and Gallicists, and finally explodes in the Age of the Enlightenment — the paper hopes to show how this debate will become central — and yet unnamable — in Romantic historiographic reconstructions of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and, more importantly, in the coeval philosophical emergence of modern dialectics.
Eva Johanna HOLMBERG (University of Helsinki)
In the Company of Franks: Early Modern ‘European’ Identities and English Travellers in the Ottoman Empire c. 1600
This paper explores how travel experiences in the Muslim world influenced the ways early modern English travellers presented themselves in relation to other European-born Christians travelling and residing in the Ottoman Empire. I will investigate the ways in which English travel texts about the Ottoman Empire constructed English, European and Christian identities in the early modern period by paying attention to the concept of the ‘Frank’ and the ways in which English travellers commented on being called a Frank, what they thought about being immersed into this category, and the ways in which they described and defined ‘Frank-ness’ in their texts. The term ‘Frank’ had been in use for a long time as an ‘ethnonym’ referring to Christians from Western Europe. It became widely used in the Muslim world from Turkey to Hindustan referring both to foreigners in general and people from Christendom in particular.
The rights and treatment of Franks in the lands of the Ottomans were important information for English travellers and traders in the region, who had to engage in the delicate diplomatic games with the Ottoman administration, as well as compete and co-operate with other European nations doing the same. The preoccupation with the treatment of ‘strangers’ in general, the level of hospitality offered by the locals and the dangers that threatened a Christian foreigner’s safe passage in the caravan routes, big cities, and trading centres of the empire was common in these texts. I will pay attention to how English travellers, while commenting on being regarded as ‘Franks’, in tandem wrote about adapting to an Ottoman setting and how they viewed themselves in an ‘Ottoman mirror’. I will pay attention to descriptions of how Turks were thought to view Englishmen and other European travellers in the Ottoman Empire, how these travellers reported being seen and treated by the Turks, and in addition, how Englishmen related to other Christian travellers from the West.
English comments about their treatment as ‘Franks’ and ‘Christian strangers’ in a Muslim Empire provide not only an interesting perspective into early modern cross-cultural exchange, and on the formation of ideas about Englishness, but also on the formation of English views on Europe as an idea and an identity during the early modern period, and how it was influenced by contacts with Ottoman Turks. My work thus contributes to the increasingly detailed examination of the construction and interaction of European and Ottoman identities by early modern scholars.
Raúl MARRERO-FENTE (University of Minnesota)
Law and Orientalism in the Spanish Empire: Relación del origen y suceso de los xarifes y del estado de los reinos de Marruecos, Fez y Tarudante by Diego de Torres (ca.1575)
Diego de Torres’ work is one of the first narratives of North Africa in the early modern period. The Relación… provides detailed information of North African people and culture from a Spanish point of view, and was presented as a political and military guide to the King of Portugal Sebastian on the verge of the Portuguese invasion of Morocco in 1579. The study of Torres’ book not only reveals the level of knowledge available in Spain concerning the African territories, it also offers a critical review of the legal imperialistic mentality that sought to introduce a negative image of the North African societies as ethnographic discourse. Contrary to appearance, the results of this process reveals the complicity that exists between European legal discourse and the mentality of imperial domination through a formal system of legal justification as part of the debates on the “illegal nature” of the North African political societies. My paper examines this epistemological mode of production as a “kind of western projection” (Said), and also proposes that the discourse of orientalism coincides with the early modern expansion of Europe (Matar). The main legacy of Torres’ work was an orientalist discourse masked by an assimilation/exclusion antinomy that constitutes the philosophical foundation of the Spanish global imperial project during the 16th century. In this cultural construction of legal identity the exclusion of the “Other” is antithetical to the West’s arrogation of universality. Torres’ work reveals this contradiction that requires the inclusion within the West of those very others excluded in its constitution.
Toby Erik WIKSTRÖM (Tulane University)
Was There a Pan-European Orientalism? Comparing the Representation of Islam in Captivity Narratives from Iceland and the Spanish Netherlands (1628-1656)
Over the last decade, numerous scholars have brought Said’s theory of orientalism to bear on early modern European identity formation, making the claim that the European discourse on the Muslim world served to forge a common European identity in early modernity by casting Islam as the Other against which the Christian West could define itself. Underlying this claim is the presupposition that different cultures within early modern Europe, in spite of religious and social differences, represented the Muslim “Orient” similarly; the discourse on Islam, whether originating in the Protestant states of the north or the Catholic monarchies in the south, would hold constant across Europe. In order to determine whether orientalism was a pan-European discourse that helped fashion a collective Western, Christian identity, I propose to compare the synchronic representation of the Muslim world in captivity narratives from two vastly different areas of Europe, Iceland – a poor, sparsely populated Lutheran colony on the geographical margins of Europe – and the Spanish Netherlands – a populous, centrally located mainland province of the most powerful Catholic monarchy in the world, Spain. Specifically, I will compare the representation of Islam in the Reisubók síra Ólafs Egilssonar [The Travel Account of Pastor Ólafur Egilsson], written in Iceland in 1628, and the Relation de la captivité & liberté du sieur Emanuel d’Aranda [The Narrative of the Capture and Liberation of Sir Emanuel d’Aranda], written by a French-speaking inhabitant of the Spanish Netherlands and first published in 1656. Although they originate from markedly different locations, the two texts have much in common. Written within the three decades of each other, both are first-person captivity narratives in which the authors detail their capture by Barbary pirates, enslavement in Algiers, eventual liberation and return to their homeland. Since so many of the texts’ most important characteristics – period of composition, narrative form and subject matter – are highly similar, if not totally identical, any difference in their representation of Islam might be due to the different religious and cultural contexts from which they spring. Thus, the two captivity narratives provide an ideal occasion to test the claim that the early modern discourse on the “Orient” was pan-European in nature.
Seth KIMMEL (Stanford University)
Reading with Arabic in Early Modern Europe
Although knowledge of Arabic and the possession of Arabic texts was cause for suspicion of heresy in late sixteenth-century Spain, humanists such as Fray Luis de León, Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas, and Benito Arias Montano trafficked in what since the nineteenth century we call “comparative Semitic philology.” Francisco Sánchez, for example, offered marginal glosses with Arabic content on Fray Luis’s Latin translation of the Hebrew Song of Songs. And Montano occasionally included Arabic commentary in his correspondence with Fray Luis about the Song of Songs and other translations from the Hebrew Old Testament. Like Joseph Scaliger, Thomas Erpenius, and other northern European scholars, these Iberian humanists made the case that familiarity with Arabic philology facilitated more accurate readings and translations of Hebrew scripture. Unlike late medieval Hebrew and Arabic grammarians whose goals were polemical or evangelical, and similarly unlike sixteenth-century Inquisitors whose agendas were punitive, these scholars argued that Arabic grammar and lexicography was of fundamental, orthodox Christian concern.
Yet early modern scholarly engagement with Arabic also served as a currency for displaying the effort of the student and the erudition of the teacher. At the conclusion of his polyglot Biblia Regia (1569-72), for example, Montano signed his name in Latin followed by the Arabic and Hebrew word for “student” [talmīd]. This multilingual (and multi-scriptural) moniker, a favorite of Montano’s, was a claim both to comparative philological authority and pedagogical humility. By demonstrating that Arabic study was a scholarly badge of honor as much as a repurposed tool for reading holy text, this paper presents a revised account of the varied motivations driving Arabic and Hebrew study in early modern Iberia while also underscoring the ways in which Orientalist philology transformed modes of theological inquiry in early modern Europe more broadly.
Javier IRIGOYEN-GARCÍA (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Defining Moorish Culture and Classicism in the Early Modern Spanish Mediterranean
In this project, I analyze how the recovery of Greco-Roman antiquity during the Renaissance takes different connotations in early modern Spain, where it is used to promote the cultural supersession of everything Moorish. I will argue that because of the impossibility of achieving a coherent definition of both Moorish and Classic culture as separate categories, this is largely a rhetorical project which involves the creation of an imaginary of cultural identity, rather than an actual intervention over Iberian cultural practices. Most commonly, cultural cleansing projects took a nominal and archeological turn: by changing the name of a cultural object or practice (or by drafting a convenient etymology), authors aimed at writing a new narrative of origins, finding in the classic Greco-Roman world the source of cultural legitimacy.
I will argue that the classicization of widely recognized Moorish cultural practices paradoxically undermined the project of redefining the boundaries of cultural difference. While creating a new narrative of cultural transmission may have offered a safe symbolic haven for an array of specific cultural practices, the pervasive reproduction of this strategy disseminated a broader understanding of the classic world. Classicism thus loses its effectiveness to convey some sense of cultural ancestry that is appropriated as a distinctive opposition to Moorish culture. But more importantly, even those writers who tried to deny that some cultural practices were not borrowed from the North African Moors usually could not help to acknowledge that they were common practices on both shores of the Mediterranean. How does this interpretation affect not only the definition of classicism but also the perception of a Moorish identity? Spanish authors rarely explored this line of inquiry further, arguably because they realized that the logic of the classicization of everything Moorish indirectly includes the Moor within it, restoring the classic world to its Mediterranean setting. I will analyze how this unresolved question haunted the early modern Spanish imaginary of difference and opened the possibility for an alternative imaginary in which “Moorish” and “Classic” were not incompatible categories, but different versions of a common Mediterranean identity.
Aigi HEERO (Tallinn University)
Maris SAAGPAKK (Tallinn University)
Adam Olearius' Journey between Occident and Orient
Adam Olearius' (1603-1671) expedition into the Orient led the travelers from Germany via Latvia, Estonia and Russia into Persia. Estonia, the first stage of the route described more closely by Olearius in his famous report, was at that time part of the Swedish Kingdom. Yet, due to several centuries of German influence and presence in the country, Estonia was marked for Olearius by a certain degree of familiarity. Tallinn, being a former member of the Hanseatic League, could therefore be referred to as the 'self' among the foreign places visited during the expedition. At the same time, a considerable number of foreign, distinguishing elements were visible which are displayed in Olearius’ descriptions. As the expedition went on into Russia and later into Persia, the degree of 'otherness' increased.
The motif of travelling from Occident to Orient and back is mirrored in the text in its constructions of identity and alterity. Olearius' text marks the different stages of othering which simultaneously show interest and rejection, attraction and fear. Our paper describes these stages of othering by providing an analysis of Olearius' reflections on the other. We reflect upon Olearius’ constructions of otherness, contextualization of nations and re-thinking of his own identity as a writer, a Christian, a man and an adventurer. Additionally, the perspectives of Olearius's fellow travelers, Paul Flemings and Otto Brüggemanns will be discussed.
Craig KOSLOFSKY (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Moors, Blacks, and Germans in Otto Friedrich von der Groeben's Orientalische Reise-Beschreibung (1694) and Des edlen Bergone... (1700)
Few early modern travelers saw both the Ottoman Empire and the coast of West Africa firsthand; fewer still left detailed reports of such travels in and beyond the Orient. The travel accounts and epic poem written by the Prussian nobleman Otto Friedrich von der Groeben (1657-1728) juxtapose the Ottoman Mediterranean with West Africa to provide a unique perspective on "the Orient as an external space of alterity" in the representation of Europeans, Muslims, and Africans.
Before he was twenty-seven, Groeben had plundered ships of "the Turks," visited Jerusalem and Cairo, and founded the first German trade fort in West Africa. Son of a venerable Prussian noble family, Groeben received nine years of Jesuit schooling and began his travels at age 17 with a journey to Italy and Malta. He joined several raids against Ottoman ships sponsored by the Knights of Malta, then made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, followed by a trip to Egypt. He returned to Brandenburg-Prussia by way of France in 1680, and in 1682 was assigned by Elector Frederick William I to the second Brandenburg voyage to the Gold Coast. He fulfilled his mission there by founding the trade fort Groß-Friedrichsburg (on coast of modern-day western Ghana). On his return to Berlin in 1683, Groeben delivered to the Elector a detailed report on his voyage to Africa.
In 1694 Groeben published the Orientalische Reise-Beschreibung, an account of his Mediterranean exploits and pilgrimage to Jerusalem, together with the Guineische Reise-Beschreibung, his account of West Africa. Illustrated from Groeben's own drawings, these "discourses on and images of the Orient" were produced for a uniquely local audience: they were printed at Marienwerder in the Duchy of Prussia (today Kwidzyn, Poland) on a press shipped there exclusively for that purpose. Six years later, Groeben published a eight hundred page epic poem of the adventures of one Bergone (an anagram of Groeben) on his journeys "to Palestine... the Pyramids... and... to Africa and to the borders of America." This work, titled Der Edlen Bergone Und Seiner Tugendhafften Areteen Denckwürdige Lebens- und Liebes-Geschichte, Zum Nutz und Vergnügen Edeler Gemüther, Als welche daraus die Sitten und Gebräuche vieler Völcker, Und die Ausführliche Beschreibung Italien, der Heiligen- und anderer Länder, ersehen können... (1700) retells Groeben's travels in verse as a romance.
In this paper I will place Groeben's works in their regional (Brandenburg-Prussian) context and compare his accounts of Ottoman and West African culture and political authority. As in other early modern accounts of the Orient, admiration and wonder alternate with alterity in Groeben's writings as he seeks to define a Christian, European, and white identity vis-à-vis Islam, the Orient, and Africa.
Lori H. NEWCOMB (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Lady Mary Wroth's Global Romance and the Traffic in Fashion
Early modern anti-romance rhetoric often equates fiction to fashion: inappropriate consumption of either allegedly corrupts English commoners with wasteful and ever-changing foreign stuff. The alleged foreignness of narrative and sartorial luxury fuses two acts of geopolitical misrecognition, both of which overestimate the economic coherence of the English social fabric while underestimating the complexity of international exchange of texts and textiles. First, the discourse of fashion reverses England's insularity by deeming the rest of Europe the "foreign"; then, in identifying luxury as (usually) Italianate, it occludes Western Europe’s trade in Middle Eastern cultural and natural resources. Ideological resistance to romance and to fashion is thus covertly Orientalist, transferring the otherness of exotic imports to a European alterity less threatening than non-Christian alterities. This paper considers these dynamics at work in Part II of Lady Mary Wroth's Urania (the manuscript continuation written after 1621). Building on the work of Bernadette Andrea (2007) on Urania Part II as a rewriting of Ottoman-Christian conflict, as well as Susan Frye’s recent work (2010) on gendered “textiles of state” (xix), I consider why dress in the Urania sometimes enforces sharp distinctions between Europe and Asia, yet elsewhere works to align Asian protocols of gendered consumption with European norms. As in her first volume (1621), Wroth uses costume as a generic marker for romance, but despite the sequel's larger international scale, its foreign costumes minimize the global traffic in romance. Instead, English identity, whether in romance writing or in dress, is paradoxically grounded in a restless hyper-eclecticism, in an allegedly superior capacity of the English to absorb and naturalize global raw materials.
Barbara FUCHS (University of California, Los Angeles)
Orientalizing Spain
This presentation starts from a peculiar moment in Said’s Orientalism, in which he compares the Spanish requerimiento to Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt. I take this moment of conflation as the occasion for rethinking how the orientalization of early modern Spain by its European rivals intersects with Spain’s own imperial expansion in the period.
David MOBERLY (University of Minnesota)
Mediterranean Piracy and the Female Captivity Experience in Early Modern Literature
Scholarly discourse surrounding early modern captivity and conversion in Islamicate lands has largely centered on male experiences, pointing out the ways in which male, European religious and national identity was threatened or reaffirmed in the captivity literature and dramas written by men and about men during the period. Very little research has centered on women's experiences in tales of captivity and conversion to Islam. Scholars such as Daniel Vitkus, Barbara Fuchs, and Jonathan Burton have investigated how literary representations of conversion from Christianity to Islam among European captives helped establish proper boundaries for European Christian male identity, but no sustained study has yet explored European Christian female captives' representations. Studies by Bindu Malieckal and Bernadette Andrea have delved into issues of women's captivity and conversion, but each of these studies has looked exclusively at depictions of women in the harem, just one of a diverse array of representations available to early modern audiences and readers. Linda Colley and Nabil Matar, though they are careful to include in their studies of captivity among the Muslims what allusions to captive women they can find, conclude that what little historical information exists on the subject in the period is of little help in uncovering the realities of women's experiences as captives.
Yet while there may not be a large body of documents to assist the historian in painting a picture of women’s actual experiences in captivity in this period, there is a significant body of literature that can be compiled to show how their experiences were conceived of by male European writers and displayed to audiences and readers in Europe. This paper will explore a portion of this body of literature, which spans multiple nations and genres ranging from captivity narratives featuring anecdotes about the female captives men met or heard about while enslaved themselves to dramas portraying captive, female characters.
In this exploration, this paper will, with an eye on issues of national and religious identity, compare early modern literature of female captivity with the previously-explored male captivity literature. It will look into the way in which European women who challenged cultural mores found themselves “Islamicized” through representations of enslaved women in the captivity genre. It will also uncover how, in an early modern world where captive European women represented to their homelands the imperial threat of the Ottoman Empire, the literature of female captivity became a stage on which transnational rivalries were fought. The strength of a nation was represented in the captivity genre by the strength of its women enslaved abroad, by how admirably they reaffirmed their identities despite a threatening and enticing Islamic hegemony. Thus, a knowledge of exactly how different nations represented women in early modern captivity literature can add a new dimension to recent analysis in this corner of the field and its commentary on the shifting Euro-Islamic power relations of the period.
Natalio OHANNA (Western Michigan University)
The Invention of Europe and the Intellectual Struggle for Political Imagination
In the Late Middle Ages, Christian Europe lacked open and reliable channels for direct knowledge of Islam, as communication with Muslims was prevented and conditioned by a set of stereotypes and suspicions emotionally based on fear. Perceptions of Islam were manipulated through a combination of four distorting precepts: first, Islam deliberately perverted the truth; second, Muslim rulers were permissive of all sorts of sexual aberrations in defiance of natural law; third, Islam was spreading in the world through violence, unlike the true faith; and finally, as Muhammad was a false prophet who led his followers to deviate from the truth, he was most certainly the Antichrist. During the Early Modern period this picture becomes much more complex. The inherited anti-Islamic rhetoric violently awakens in the face of the threatening advance of the Ottomans at the gates of Vienna, and the discursive configuration of the ‘Orient’ takes on renewed meanings in the dialectic of Renaissance humanists and sixteenth-century reformers such as Erasmus and Luther. In this paper, I explore how this geopolitical juncture ignites a contradictory conceptualization of Europe (as a territorial, linguistic, historical, cultural, genealogical and religious union) in two ideologically polarized treatises addressed to Charles the Fifth in the year of the siege.The first, Exhortation to the War Against the Turks (Bologna, 1529), by Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, justifies religious war, encourages the emperor to fight for the faith and to conquer and colonize the Levant for the exploitation of its resources, following the model of Spanish enterprises in the New World. The second, Concord and Discord in the Human Race (Antwerp, 1529), by Juan Luis Vives, is a pacifist essay that emphasizes the incompatibility between human nature and imperialism, calling for an immediate ceasefire and criticizing the demonization of Islam as a political instrument.
Marcus KELLER (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Europe, France, and the Ottoman Empire in the Essais: Montaigne’s Dialectics
A monumental text of the Western philosophical tradition, Montaigne’s Essais are also a major contribution to French Orientalism at the turn of the sixteenth century, containing numerous allusions to the East. In this paper I will explore some of the more than fifty passages the essayist devotes to the Ottoman Empire and show how they are intricately related to a much broader reflection about the place of France in Europe and in the world. Far from being “declarative, self-evident and timeless eternal” (Said about imaginary Orientals), Montaigne’s Turks are versatile figures, fulfill multiple argumentative functions, and are revealed as incarnations of humanity. This, in turn, complicates Montaigne’s imaginary geography and the dialectical relationship between France, Europe, and the Ottoman Empire it proposes. The treatment of the Ottoman Empire thus becomes a particularly apt case study of the specific dialectics at work in the Essais.
Heather MADAR (Humboldt State University)
Victor, Vanquished and Victim:
Vienna, Tunis and the Representation of European-Ottoman Conflict
The unsuccessful siege of Vienna by the armies of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent in 1529 and the conquest of Tunis by Charles V in 1535 were both understood at the time as watershed victories of European forces over the mighty Ottomans. Both events were commemorated in Europe in visual form. The Siege of Vienna was depicted extensively in printed materials, including single sheet broadsheets, multi-page pamphlets and image series. The most notable visual commemoration of the conquest of Tunis was a series of tapestries commissioned by Charles V.
Printed images illustrating the siege of Vienna were produced in close temporal proximity to the event. Their overt function is thus documentary, with the images providing a visual report of the events of the siege and narrating the unfolding conflict. These are far from neutral reports, however, with graphic illustrations of alleged Ottoman atrocities featuring heavily. The images participate in a visual Orientalism, and structure a clear us – imperiled Central Europeans – versus them – the rapacious Ottoman Other. These images also helped establish a shorthand visual iconography of the “Turk” in popular, printed materials. Printed images of the siege of Vienna were largely produced in Nuremberg. The Nuremberg publishing industry was dominant at this point, yet this fact alone does not satisfactorily explain the prevalence of this imagery. The specific political circumstances of Nuremberg and its position as a free imperial city provide a fuller explanation.
The conquest of Tunis tapestries were executed more than a decade after the events they commemorated. Housed in the Toledo palace, the tapestries were often brought with Charles V on his travels, where they functioned as a vehicle to showcase the emperor’s military prowess. The tapestries narrate the campaign’s events, featuring the acts of Charles, moments of battle, and Ottoman atrocities. They are also clearly works of imperial propaganda, which show Charles in the guise of a Christian crusader and as a second Scipio. As such, they are among the most visible of Charles V’s usages of anti-Ottoman imagery to buttress his claims to universal sovereignty, highlight his power, and promote an image of himself as the protector of Christendom.
Images of the siege of Vienna produced in Nuremberg and Charles V’s commissioned imagery of the conquest of Tunis both partake in contemporary Orientalist discourses, and contribute in significant ways to the sixteenth century image of Islam and the “Turk.” These images also share a broadly similar brief, namely, the depiction of military conflicts in which European forces prevailed, and share a common view of the Ottomans as vicious antagonists. Yet the goals, the visual strategies and the medium – the elite, courtly medium of tapestry versus more popular prints – of these bodies of imagery differ significantly. These images illuminate the utility of Ottoman imagery in the two very different contexts of Imperial Spain and the city of Nuremberg, showcase the flexibility and highlight the politicization of sixteenth century Orientalist imagery.
José Luis GASCH TOMÁS (European University Institute, Florence)
Natalia MAILLARD ÁLVAREZ (European University Institute, Florence)
Discourses and Images of the Orients in the Hispanic Empire: New Spain and Castile, 1550-1650
In spite of the conquest of the Kingdom of Granada in the beginning of the early modern period, the Muslim influence on Castile was still strong: first, an important and sometimes conflictive minority of moriscos remained within the territory of Castile until 1609; second, the confrontation with Berber pirates in northern Africa, where Castile had some towns such as Oran and Ceuta, was permanent along the sixteenth century; and third, the Ottoman enemy was a real threat in the Mediterranean during this period as well. This influence was also visible through the existence of Muslim decorative and artistic vestiges, along with customs and traditions like the southern Castilian elites’ habit of seating over pillows.
At the same time, the Castilians came into contact with another ‘Orient’. The conquest of the Americas and the Philippines, and the subsequent opening of the commercial route between Acapulco and Manila in 1565, allowed the Chinese to flood with manufactured products, like silk and porcelains, the American markets. Nonetheless, the commercial was not the sole contact with the ‘Far East’. Hundreds of Catholic missionaries of the Hispanic Monarchy attempted the spiritual conquest of those ‘exotic’ lands, mainly China and Japan. These facts generated literature about Asia that spread across both Europe and the Americas.
Our proposal focuses on a part of this story. Our first step will be to analyze the images and representations of these two ‘Orients’ in New Spain and Castile, to be precise in Mexico City and Seville. We will examine the presence of oriental objects (both Muslim and Chinese) and books about Orient in the probate inventories from the notarial minutes of Mexico and Seville, in order to see the spread and reception of images of the “Orients” within the people’s daily life. Taking this information as a reference, our last aim is to answer the following questions: Which was the reception of those products and books in Mexico City and Seville? How the relative presence of such objects in both Hispanic cities influenced the self-representation of their societies?
To what extent did these objects play a role in the shaping of different identities in both shores of the Atlantic?
Adam G. BEAVER (Princeton University)
Pietro Martire in the Levant: Orientalism in the Age of Spanish Empire
Flip hurriedly to the back of the first authorized edition of Pietro Martire d’Anghiera’s famous Decades de orbe novo (1511), the first history of the Spanish conquest of the New World, and you will find an extended ethnography of a people living in a truly barbarous state. Though Martire (1457–1526) allowed that a subsection of this society’s male population was valiant and strong in military pursuits, he nevertheless condemned the “mass of this people” as “cowardly, effeminate, weak, libertine, soft, and timid.” Their lives, he affirmed, were “dark and silent”: an unsurprising fact, according to Martire, given that they all—even their rulers—lived in a state of slavery virtually incomprehensible to cultivated Europeans. Noting that they were suited “exclusively for the mechanical arts,” he concluded that the Spanish ought to engage them in trade—in particular, to exploit the local supply of balsam, that priceless medicament favored by medieval doctors and derived from the sap of a rare species of palm. Should the natives prove hostile, Martire concluded, they ought to be intimidated by a show of Spain’s military might.
Martire’s sense of Spanish superiority vis-à-vis this overseas civilization will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with De orbe novo’s secondhand portrait of the West Indies. Though Martire never visited the Americas, the reports which he received from early explorers led him to emphasize the New World’s primitive or barbarian qualities. What is surprising, then, about Martire’s portrait of this “dark and silent” society is that it is not, in fact, a Caribbean fantasy. Rather, it purports to describe Martire’s firsthand experience with the Muslim inhabitants of Egypt, that very oldest of Old Worlds.
The passage in question technically appears in a separate work, Martire’s Legatio Babylonica, a collection of humanist epistles chronicling Martire’s adventures as Ferdinand and Isabella’s ambassador to the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt in 1501–1502. In each of its first three editions, however, the Legatio issued from the press fused to De orbe novo, the Egyptian letters constituting a coda, or even counterpoint, to Martire’s better-known description of the New World across the Atlantic. A gripping account which reveals the extent to which Spain’s emerging empire depended upon the Muslim ruler whom Europeans knew as the “Sultan of Babylonia,” the Legatio is one of the most remarkable texts of the Spanish Renaissance. Animated by Martire’s vast humanist erudition and unflagging curiosity about Egyptian civilization, the text is, simultaneously, an early Orientalist travelogue and a shrewd assessment of the state of Christian-Muslim relations at the dawn of the Age of Discovery.
Martire’s scholarly engagement with the Near East, coming just at the moment that Spain began its turn toward the Atlantic World, offers an unusually good opportunity to connect the early history of Renaissance Orientalism to Europeans’ contemporary expansion into other regions of the globe. In my paper, I will focus on Martire’s efforts to write an ethnography of an Islamic civilization in the context of his fellow Spaniards’ simultaneous encounters with a new class of “barbarians” in the West.
Ana María RODRÍGUEZ-RODRÍGUEZ (University of Iowa)
Mapping Islam in the Philippines:
Moro Anxieties of the Spanish Empire in the Pacific
Historia de Mindanao y Joló, written by the Jesuit priest Francisco de Combés and published in Madrid in 1667, is the best-known example among several texts that approach the contact of Spaniards with Islam during the colonial occupation of the Philippine Islands. This is a little-known encounter, represented in long-ignored texts that have been little analyzed as discursive manifestations of the contact with alterity in a unique context: a colonial space characterized by its marginality within the Spanish empire.
When Magellan arrived in Samar in 1521, Islam already had a consolidated presence in the southern Philippines. The Spaniards soon dismantled the Sultanate of Manila, but Mindanao and Sulu defied the Spanish colonial power for decades, and between 1663 and 1718 Spaniards were obliged to leave Mindanao. The Philippines were a strategic territory in the Pacific Ocean for a long time, and for this reason the colony was valued mainly as a bridge for evangelizing Asia and as a commercial gateway between New Spain (Mexico) and the ports in the South of China and the Spice Islands. The first aspect guided the work of different religious orders (Augustinians, Franciscans, Dominicans and Jesuits) while the State took charge of the second. Numerous participants in the colonization process wrote different kinds of texts (historical, ethnographic, military, literary…) reflecting their experiences in this newly discovered territory and offering their interpretation and understanding of the new realities and peoples encountered.
The writing of Historia de Mindanao y Joló, and also of several other texts that I will include in my analysis, are guided by complex mechanisms based on difference and processes of negotiation: negotiation with the expectations of the Peninsular readers, with the knowledge acquired after direct contact with Islam, and of course with the transformations that this prolonged contact provokes in the writing subject. The texts must confront the challenge of communicating the unique experience of a new reality while the writing subject negotiates his identity and simultaneously deals with the transformations of his self. My presentation will analyze the mechanisms used to represent the complex contact with the Muslim Other in the Philippines, and the impact that the writing process has on the definition of the self and of the collective consciousness. The texts reveal a physical and symbolic scenery where “official” ideology, based on insufficient stereotypes, does not always provide an appropriate mold to contain the process of apprehending and understanding both the Self and the Other in this new space. The Southern Pacific, where Spaniards compete with the Portuguese and the Dutch, becomes the site of imperial rivalries and anxieties that invite an interrogation of the definition of a Spanish imperial identity and, simultaneously, the validity of apparently well-internalized perceptions of Islam.
I believe that my study will not only add to our collective knowledge about the contact between Muslims and Spanish Catholics in the 16th and 17th centuries, but also shed light on how the identity of the Pacific Spanish empire, and of the writing imperial subject in particular, was negotiated and problematized in the texts of this period.
Nabil MATAR (University of Minnesota)
In their Own Words: Eastern Christians of the Ottoman Empire
This paper examines writings of the Christian minority in the Ottoman
Empire in the early modern period. How did Christian Arabic authors, all of
whom were members of the clergy, describe the Others – be those the
Muslim majority around them or the ‘Frankish’ society of Western
Europe? Did they orientalize the Muslims/Muslim East and Occidentalize
western Christians/the West?
early modern travel writings and diplomatic correspondence. These
representations emphasized the trying conditions of those Christians, as
well as their ignorance and need for Protestant or Catholic conversion. But
the Arabic writings of those Ottoman communities reveal a different
self-understanding. By focusing on a selection of manuscripts, this paper
will argue for the study of the Christian Arabic voices, in their own
writings, rather than through foreign or legal sources.
Lisa ROSENTHAL (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Amazon Battle and the Construction of the Seventeenth-Century Antwerp Painting Canon
In 1628 Willem van Haecht painted an idealized “portrait” of the wealthly Antwerp spice merchant Cornelius van der Gheest’s celebrated art collection. The gallery, or kuntskamer, picture features works by artists from Antwerp, past and present, thereby helping to codify the great Antwerp painting canon, a project taken up with particular vigor in this period. In his picture of the collection Van Haecht gives special emphasis to Van der Gheest’s Amazon Battle by Rubens. This paper considers how this kunstakmer picture both mobilizes and soothes Orientalist anxieties in the scene of Netherlandish canon formation. Rubens’s picture depicts warrior women, associated both in the classical antiquity and in early modern Europe, with Eastern and barbaric lands beyond civilization; in van Haecht’s kunstkamer the Amazon Battle importantly shapes the emergent concept of the Netherlandish canon as a distinct cultural patrimony, while referring to, domesticating, and disavowing the East from which van der Gheest’s wealth derived.
Opher MANSOUR (University of Hong Kong)
Popes and Persians in the Sala Regia of the Quirinal Palace
As a major centre of oriental studies, missionary activity, diplomatic contact, and visual culture, the Papacy played a key part in shaping and reshaping early-modern attitudes to Islam and the Orient. This paper explores the ways in which early 17th century popes, in their attempts to bolster their own position within the European state system, and to assert superiority over their protestant rivals, reformulated the image of the Islamic ‘other’ within a context of global diplomatic and missionary activity.
The paper will focus on the representation of Persian ambassadors (see figs. 1 & 2) in one of the most prominent papal fresco commissions of the early seicento: the decoration of the Sala Regia of the Quirinal Palace (1615-16).
Between 1601 and 1622, a succession of Safavid Persian ambassadors visited the Holy See, as both parties sought to make common cause against the mutual Ottoman enemy. Seeking to capitalize on these intensified diplomatic contacts, Paul V had two of these embassies represented, alongside other extra-European ambassadors (see fig.3) in one of the principal rooms of the Quirinal, itself a site for the reception of ambassadors.
Focusing on the images of Persian ambassadors, this paper places visual representation in the context of diplomatic representation, by whichan individual is made to stand for an alien state while simultaneously participating in one of Europe’s key rituals of civilizational community. The Quirinal frescoes ‘normalize’ their Islamic subjects: they insert them into a global context of non-European cultures, characterized (collectively) as assimilable others, who demonstrate their receptivity to Catholic spiritual authority; at the same time, the religious alterity of the Persian ambassadors is relativized by the prominence given to signs of political and culture difference. In representing Muslims in this way, and in this context, the Papacy was in turn able to re-assert its accustomed role as the spiritual axis of European civilization on an expanded, global stage.
In conclusion, this paper will seek to demonstrate that, in representing Persians for its own propagandistic ends in a period of intensifying global contacts, the Papacy devised and promulgated imagery that sought to propagate a more politically and culturally nuanced view of Islamic subjects.
Lydia M. SOO (University of Michigan)
The Architectural Setting of “Empire”: The English experience of Ottoman spectacle in the late 17th century and its consequences
On 10 May 1675 members of the Levant Company in Constantinople, which looked after the economic and political interests of the British crown in this part of the world, arrived in Adrianople (today’s Edirne). The purpose of the journey was for the ambassador, Sir Thomas Finch, to meet the Grand Signor and negotiate the continuation of trading privileges for English merchants within in the Ottoman Empire, a process that took about six weeks. But the delegation ended up staying for five months due to delays caused by the plague, but also a series of large scale, public festivals, extending over weeks and marking important moments in the life of sultan Mehmet IV (r. 1648-87), his family, and his people. These ceremonies and cavalcades, of a type also witnessed in Constantinople, caught, profoundly, the attention of the English visitors. Through them, John Covel writes, “we saw much of the Glory of the Empire.”
This paper reconstructs what these Englishmen saw in Adrianople, using three accounts by members of the Levant Company--Covel, Dudley North, and Paul Rycaut. They describe and record in drawings the architectural setting for these celebrations, including buildings and clothing, as well as the participants and their actions. This reconstruction reveals that despite their habitual rhetoric expressing disdain for the religion, customs, and arts of the Turks, the English could not help but be impressed by the grandeur, wealth, and power of the Ottoman Empire displayed in these spectacles and suggesting a culture even more “modern” than their own.
The “imperial envy” (MacLean, 2007) of the English led them to adopt the Ottoman and other eastern empires, including the Chinese, as models for nation building, achieved not only through political and economic means, but also through architecture. But the use of “exotic” styles in designs, copying decorative motifs but also entire buildings found in “the East,” would not occur until well into the 18th century. While less visibly apparent, during the second half of the 17th century England the example of imperial grandeur had a more profound effect: to challenge the traditional primacy of the classical style in architecture and the idea of a universal, absolute beauty based on the authority of the ancient Greeks and Romans. By glancing away from the model of past, extinct empires to living, thriving ones, as well as from the authority of nature and God to that of custom and society, architects like Christopher Wren and John Webb envisioned an architecture that was a specific national manifestation of a universal classicism. For them and their patrons, including Charles II and his successors, this architecture would provide the setting, but also the catalyst, for a nascent British nation and, over time, empire.
Kaya ŞAHIN (Tulane University)
Between Humanist Ideals and Political Pragmatism:
Busbecq’s Ottoman Missions (1554-1562)
Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (1522-1592) received a thorough humanist education in Flanders and Italy and served three Holy Roman Emperors as bureaucrat, diplomat, courtier and tutor. His best-known work, The Turkish Letters, is based on observations made during his diplomatic missions in the Ottoman Empire between 1554 and 1562. A partial edition was published in 1581, and a complete edition saw the light of day in 1589. The Letters reached bestseller status soon after its publication, and it continues to occupy a canonical place among early modern European writings on the Ottomans.
In my presentation, in tune with the conference’s objectives, I will first of all focus on the tension between the idealizing and nostalgic gaze of the humanist and the pragmatic and direct voice of the diplomat and politician. This dichotomy is particularly important while discussing the differences and similarities between early modern European writings on the Orient and the works of later Orientalists discussed by Said and others.
Second, I will question Busbecq’s definitions of Europe and Christianity, and argue that he utilizes the Ottoman threat in order to defend a pro-Habsburg position that aspires to unite Christianity under the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor and Catholicism. Busbecq’s ideas about Christianity, Europe and the Greco-Roman heritage, and his views of the Ottomans, do not exclusively stem from preexisting cultural stereotypes about the “Orient.” Rather, they reflect the cultural and political anxieties plaguing the sixteenth-century Habsburg elites. The Europe/Christendom that Busbecq claims to defend is profoundly fractured and divided alongside political and confessional lines, and the Letters is, among other things, a denunciation of this lost unity.
My final point will be about the relevance of Busbecq for the study of the Ottoman Empire and, in general, the potential uses and limitations of early modern European narratives on the Ottomans. I will compare his observations with the actual historical record and show that, despite the idealizations of the humanist and the hostility of the Habsburg propagandist, the observations of the pragmatic still provide us with a level of knowledge that is not always available in contemporary Ottoman sources.
José Alberto R. SILVA TAVIM (Institute for Tropical Scientific Research, Lisbon)
The Grão-Turco and the Jews:
Translation to the West of two Oriental “powers” (XVI-XVII centuries)
To understand the existing western imagery regarding the relationship between Sultans and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, with all its ambivalence and asymmetry, is necessary to know the postulate underlying the “construction” of images on that empire and its rulers per se; and also on the destiny of the Jews as an homeless people cursed to wander eternally.
What rhetorical arguments are visible in different sources – pamphlets, religious literature, travelogues, and inquisitorial processes – to depict the historical sequence events that led to the encounter between the expelled Iberian Jews and the Ottoman Empire, seen as a realm of emotions? It is well known the accusation made by some western travellers, as the French Nicolas de Nicolay, that the Sephardim Jews played a crucial role on the Ottoman’s technological modernisation, especially in the field of weaponry. As such, they were portrayed accordingly in the West in the stereotyped image of a people of traitors, who contributed to the increasing power of the Infidels. But, in those sources, was this Sultan/Jews relationship dialectic, that is, was it transmitted in the West into an essentialist discourse? And to the West, was there an effective alliance between the two, since they were perceived as Christendom’s “enemies”?
We aim to demonstrate that, in this particular and fundamental matter, some information publicised in the West on the expelled Iberian Jews social position in the Ottoman Empire had more to do with the usage of the Jewish perfidy theme, stressing more their repression by the sultan’s “polluted” power, than to really infuse fear into an European audience on an eventual alliance between the two. Simultaneously, if the Ottoman Empire seems to “mirror” the western wishes and values towards the Jewish minorities, particularly when western authors underline the vexation and violence perpetrated by the Turks against the Jews, does it not the ensuing image “compromise” the former? And won’t these “conceptions” of the Ottoman context push the “Great Enemy” in the Middle East to the assumption that the “Other” - the Jews and Moors - before included in the Iberian society and some surviving there, was really alien to the construction of a (Catholic) westernness?
María Antonia GARCÉS (Cornell University)
Captive, Spy, Ethnographer: Antonio de Sosa in Algiers
Antonio de Sosa’s Topography of Algiers, the first book of his Topographia, e Historia general de Argel (1612), was edited and published after Sosa’s death by Diego de Haedo. Written by Sosa while imprisoned in the dungeons of Algiers from 1577 to 1581, this work is a riveting eyewitness account of cultural life in the Turkish-Algerian Regency in the sixteenth century. During his captivity, Sosa worked tirelessly to gather a massive amount of information on the history and mores of the city, data that was initially put together as a spy’s report for Philip II. Painting an animated and live tableau of daily life in this prosperous Muslim urban center, Sosa’s chronicle stands out for its complexity, vitality, and the sharpness of the author’s ethnographic vision.
Reading and writing day after day, obsessively recording every bit of information obtained from Christian slaves and their captors, Sosa transformed his captivity into a scenario for writing, and his tiny prison cell into a writer’s “garret”—complete with books, paper, pen, and ink. In this sense, the writings of both Sosa and Cervantes on Algiers suggest that captivity can be viewed as a mode of continuous eye-witnessing that transforms the captive (malgré lui) into an intimate observer of a different culture. Despite his denunciations of the tortures imposed on Christian captives by their Turkish-Algerian slave-masters and his activities as a spy for the Spanish Crown, Sosa’s captivity in the household of an important municipal officer offered him a privileged point of observation on Algerian society. Following anthropologist Neil Whitehead, I argue that captivity, understood as a physical incarceration or a personal intellectual fascination, is a vital condition for the emergence of ethnography. As a literary form, moreover, the birth of ethnography is coexistent with the appearance of travel writing. Sosa’s Topography, in fact, is constructed like a contemporary ethnographic monograph with descriptions of the material culture, kinship, marriage, death rituals, and religious beliefs in Algiers at the end of the sixteenth century. Like a travel story, Sosa’s itineraries throughout the North African metropolis constitute both a tour and a detailed map of early modern Algiers, while his texts at once explore and transgress intimate or sacred places —Oriental trajectories that “speak” in eloquent ways.
Oumelbanine ZHIRI (University of California, San Diego)
Bodies and Souls: European Captives in North Africa
The early modern period was a time of confrontation between empires and pirates in a number of maritime theaters, such as the Caribbean and the Mediterranean seas. In the latter, it is impossible to overstate the part played by corsairs and pirates in the often contentious relationship between West European and North African countries – although there is still considerably more talk about the “Barbary corsairs” than their European counterparts. A great number of men and women were caught in the crossfire, captured by either side, and enslaved. Some died in captivity or in the galleys, others converted and assimilated in the enemy society, the lucky ones were ransomed. Their stories on the one hand hardened the confrontation between Europe and North Africa, between Christians and Muslims, and on the other, complicates it immensely through the prevalence of conversion.
My talk will examine some ramifications of this tangled history of frequent wars and uneasy truces. What role did the captives, and in particular the European slaves, play in the shaping of the image of the Oriental Other? Which parts did the figures of the Oriental, of the slave, of the pirate, play in the transition of European national identities and state power toward more modern forms? These questions will be approached through the French Crown efforts to redeem the captives of Barbary; this undertaking came to play an essential part in the fierce military and ideological competition with Spain, and helped shape France’s own imperial ambitions.
The confrontations and negotiations with the North African powers over this issue are an essential prism through which to understand the political evolution of early modern Europe. At stake were the bodies and souls of the captives, ferociously contested on both sides. Beyond the crucial religious and economic aspects, one has to also examine the cultural impact, in particular on the burgeoning scholarly field of Oriental studies, itself an essential site in which Western Europe in the early modern period reconfigured its imagining of itself and of its Others.
Karoline P. COOK (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Contesting ‘Morisco’ in the Courtroom: Religious Identity, Lineage, and Honor in an Encomienda Dispute in New Granada
My paper focuses on an encomendero in sixteenth-century New Granada who was accused of being a Morisco. His case raises a number of questions. How did ideas about Moriscos and Muslims circulate overseas and enter into daily interactions ‘on the ground’? How did individuals conceive of and define community in the early modern Spanish world, and how were such conceptions set in motion to include and exclude people? The legal makeup of the category Morisco pointed to who could enjoy certain rights or be denied others.
More broadly, I trace how Moriscos – as both individuals who struggled to join a community that was increasingly restricting their activities, and as fictive entities who fueled authorities’ fears and sparked denunciations – shed light on the emerging Spanish Atlantic empire. Spanish authorities feared that Moriscos would settle in the Americas and encourage indigenous peoples to practice Islam, thereby undermining the Crown’s justification for conquest. Accusations that individuals descended from Muslims arose in the context of local disputes, and presented discourses of honor that invoked lineage and religious identity.
Through debates over the position of Moriscos at the imperial level, and individual negotiations of status in the courtroom, it becomes possible to identify competing conceptions of identity: some commentators advocated the immutability of characteristics like blood, while others promoted more fluid conceptions of status shaped by reputation.
Robyn RADWAY (Rutgers University)
Representing the Christians of Ottoman Europe:
Self, Other, and the In-between in Costume Books of the Sixteenth Century
As guides to the hierarchies of Ottoman society, sixteenth century costume books contained purportedly accurate depictions of richly costumed and exotic sultans, their wives, various military divisions, and eunuchs, through more quotidian monks, cooks, street fighters, and lepers. The significant number of Christians portrayed in these costume books greatly complicates the Orientalist readings of earlier scholars. I argue that consideration of the ambiguous and hybrid identities of the Christians of Ottoman Europe sheds new light on the costume book genre by deconstructing the dichotomy of East and West to explore the complex realm of the in-between. A series of woodcuts by Melchior Lorck, referred to as the Turkish Publication, and an illuminated manuscript produced for Lambert de Vos (Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Bremen, MS or9) are suggested to devote over a quarter of their images to the hybrid and ambiguous identities of the Christians of Ottoman Europe. Focusing in on the winged division of light cavalry referred to as the Turkish delhi, complex histories of individual components of costume, such as the shield, are used in attempting to tease out problems of the relationship between text and image and artistic intention versus viewer reception. In backing away from questions of influence across an imaginary line of difference and looking to the in-between, a more ambiguous relationship between viewer and subject, and between self and other is explored. Lastly, the epitome of this in-betweenness presented through a small volume in the Wolfenbüttel (MS 206) suggests the complexities that arise when a costume book is produced and consumed by Christians of Ottoman Europe. Here the self, the other, and the in-between, become intertwined in the “timeless discourse of irrationality,” which these images attempt to control, contain, and reappraise.