Hospitable Harems? A European Woman and Oriental Spaces in the Enlightenment

Paragraph ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
JUDITH STILL
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
Careful Consideration ◽  
Turkish Women ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
European Woman

This is an analysis of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters, first written in the early eighteenth century when she travelled to the Ottoman Empire, and finally ‘published’ in 1763. As well as producing ‘the very first example of a secular work by a woman about the Muslim Orient’, Montagu is a pioneer in introducing the Turkish women's practice of inoculation against smallpox into England. This article sets out the long-standing critical debate over the rights and wrongs of the Letters, particularly focusing on the period since the 1970s when feminist and post-colonial readings have presented or questioned Montagu's credentials with respect to the politics of sex, sexuality, race, religion and class. It concludes that Montagu describes how she is received with considerable, if conditional, hospitality by Turkish women in their bagnio and ‘harems’, and that her writing is, in turn, conditionally hospitable towards them. She is explicitly concerned not to fall into the Orientalizing clichés of Early Modern men's travel writing, which typically represents Muslim women as imprisoned in harems, enslaved, starved of sex and sexually voracious. By careful consideration of the historical, political and social context of the societies which Montagu knew, and could make comparison between, a modern reader too can act hospitably in taking Montagu's narrative into her own.

Phanariot Tongues: The Mavrocordatos Family and the Power of the Turkish Language in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Empire

2021 ◽  
Vol 101 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-220
Author(s):  
Nir Shafir
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Formal Grammar ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Rare Exception ◽  
Turkish Language ◽  
Implicit Power

Abstract The Phanariots — Grecophone Christian elites who ruled the Danubian principalities in the eighteenth century — were the only non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire who claimed power by virtue of their command of the Turkish language. Why were they the rare exception and what does their story reveal about the ways in which power and language were intertwined in the early modern Ottoman Empire? The implicit power relations embedded in the Turkish language are rendered visible in a unique text written in 1731 in which Constantine Mavrocordatos, a Phanariot prince, attempted to school his younger brother in Turkish through a series of twelve, play-like dialogues. The dialogues did not aim to teach the formal grammar of Turkish but to demonstrate the power of speech by familiarizing the reader with the eloquent and witty repartee of Ottoman bureaucrats. Through an analysis of the text — which includes reestablishing its authorship and date of composition — the article examines the Phanariots’ liminal position in Ottoman governance, especially in the newly ascendant imperial bureaucracy, through the prism of language. In doing so, it also rewrites the place of the Mavrocordatos family in the story of the Enlightenment in the Ottoman Empire.

Amores perritos: Puppies, Laughter and Popular Catholicism in Bourbon Mexico City

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
FRANK ‘TREY’ PROCTOR
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Face ◽  
Bourbon Reforms ◽  
Popular Classes

AbstractIn late eighteenth-century Mexico City, Spanish colonials, particularly members of the urban middle and popular classes, performed a number of weddings and baptisms on puppies (which were wearing clothes or bejewelled collars) in the context of fandangos or dance parties. These ceremonies were not radical challenges to orthodoxy or conservative reactions in the face of significant economic, political, religious and cultural Bourbon reforms emanating from Spain. Employing Inquisitorial investigations of these ceremonies, this article explores the rise of pet keeping, the meanings of early modern laughter and the implications of the cultural and religious components of the Enlightenment-inspired Bourbon reforms in late colonial Mexico.

The First Scottish Enlightenment

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelsey Jackson Williams
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Intensive Study ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Religious Minorities ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
North Eastern ◽  
Scottish History

Traditional accounts of the Scottish Enlightenment present the half-century or so before 1750 as, at best, a not yet fully realized precursor to the era of Hume and Smith, at worst, a period of superstition and religious bigotry. This is the first book-length study to systematically challenge that notion. Instead, it argues that the era between approximately 1680 and 1745 was a ‘First’ Scottish Enlightenment, part of the continent-wide phenomenon of Early Enlightenment and led by the Jacobites, Episcopalians, and Catholics of north-eastern Scotland. It makes this argument through an intensive study of the dramatic changes in historiographical practice which took place in Scotland during this era, showing how the documentary scholarship of Jean Mabillon and the Maurists was eagerly received and rapidly developed in Scottish historical circles, resulting in the wholesale demolition of the older, humanist myths of Scottish origins and their replacement with the foundations of our modern understanding of early Scottish history. This volume accordingly challenges many of the truisms surrounding seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scottish history, pushing back against notions of pre-Enlightenment Scotland as backward, insular, and intellectually impoverished and mapping a richly polymathic, erudite, and transnational web of scholars, readers, and polemicists. It highlights the enduring cultural links with France and argues for the central importance of Scotland’s two principal religious minorities—Episcopalians and Catholics—in the growth of Enlightenment thinking. As such, it makes a major intervention in the intellectual and cultural histories of Scotland, early modern Europe, and the Enlightenment itself.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corey Tazzara
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Public Choice ◽  
Policy Process ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Rent Seeking ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Economic Liberty ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Enlightenment

The conclusion draws on the book’s key themes to revisit models of the policy process in early modern Europe, particularly that of rent-seeking as understood by public choice economists. It shows that the fight against monopoly was co-constituted with the origins of a science of commerce during the Enlightenment. If the mercantilist state of the Ancien Régime was an outgrowth of a rent-seeking society, it was because the rent-seekers themselves enjoyed a monopoly on economic expertise until the eighteenth century. The new science of economics did not expel local merchants from regime counsels as much as reformers might have desired, however. It gave merchants a powerful rhetorical arsenal concerning economic liberty that helped secure localities from unwanted interference by the central government.

Tordesillas and the Ottoman Caliphate: Early Modern Frontiers and the Renaissance of an Ancient Islamic Institution

2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (6) ◽  
pp. 485-511 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giancarlo Casale
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Abbasid Caliphate ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Wide Gap

This article revisits the question of the “Ottoman caliphate,” the doctrine defining the Ottoman sultan as the universal sovereign and protector of Muslims throughout the world in addition to the territorial ruler of the Ottoman Empire itself. In existing scholarship, a wide gap divides those who describe this doctrine as a construct of modernity, with a history that goes back no farther than the late eighteenth century, and those who maintain a direct line of transmission from the earlier Abbasid caliphate to the Ottoman dynasty. This article proposes an “early modern alternative” to these two opposing narratives, which acknowledges a dynamic history of reinvention for the caliphate but locates its rebirth not in the period of colonial modernity but rather in the sweeping reconfiguration of space, time, and sovereignty ushered in by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494.

A Commerce of Knowledge

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Mills
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
History Of

A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship between England and the Ottoman Empire, c.1600–1760 tells the story of three generations of Church of England chaplains who served the English Levant Company in Aleppo, Syria, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The book reconstructs the careers of its protagonists in the cosmopolitan city of Ottoman Aleppo, and brings to light the links between English commercial and diplomatic expansion and English scholarly and missionary interests: the study of Middle-Eastern languages; the exploration of biblical and Greco-Roman antiquities; and the early dissemination of Protestant literature in Arabic. Early modern Orientalism is usually conceived as an episode in the history of scholarship. By shifting the focus to Aleppo, A Commerce of Knowledge draws attention to connections between the seemingly aloof world of the early modern university and spheres of commercial and diplomatic life, tracing the emergence of new kinds of philological and archaeological enquiry in England back to a series of real-world encounters between the chaplains and the scribes, booksellers, priests, rabbis, and sheikhs whom they encountered in the Ottoman Empire. Setting the careers of its protagonists against a background of broader developments across Protestant and Catholic Europe, the book shows how the institutionalization of English scholarship, and the later English attempt to influence the Eastern Christian churches, were bound up with the international struggle to establish a commercial foothold in the Levant. It then argues that these connections would endure until the shift of British commercial and imperial interests to the Indian subcontinent in the second half of the eighteenth century fostered new currents of intellectual life at home.

Between Islands: Colonial Legacies and Cultural Imaginaries

Pólemos ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Bottomley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Small Island ◽  
Eighteenth Century Literature ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial Legacy ◽  
Cultural Imaginary ◽  
Colonial Legacies ◽  
The Tropics

AbstractThis paper explores one aspect of the geo-cultural axis constructing the “between” of England as island-metropole and the colonised islands of the Antillean archipelago: that of the crucial significance of the figuration of “island” in the colonial cultural imaginary of the early modern period. It is suggested that the development of “island” as key topographical trope, signifying sea power as opposed to continental imperialism, was a crucial means through which the metropolitan English curated an image of how colonial expansionism might be given meaning, and be experienced, in such a way as to enhance and enrich, rather than overwhelm and impoverish, England as “small island.” Using material drawn from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, the paper traces the emergence of, first, England imaged as island garden-paradise, and then, second, the transposition and translation of “garden-paradise” islands into the tropics. This is framed by two images: the first the late seventeenth-century Paston Treasure, and the second a late eighteenth-century portrait of two young women by David Martin. The first is used to illustrate the need to order and curate images of, and in response to, the ‘colonial’ as an experience of encounter and engagement with “Other” through processes of legitimated and authorised subjectification. The second is deployed to illustrate the extent to which the “insular” English cultural imaginary achieved and sustained an account of the beneficial-colonial overseas project and marginalised, to the point of suppression, the violence of the actual-colonial in/on remote “(small) islands.” The portrait of the two women is then used to project forward in time in order to make visible the continuing strength of the colonial legacy of paradise-islands in the contemporary English cultural imaginary: in particular, in the exotic out-of-world and timeless imagery deployed in tourist brochures. As a final coda, the paper ends with referencing the potential of an-other “between islands”: that of a complex network of inter-Antillean creolisation interrupting and challenging the legacy of the linear and centrifugal metropole-(post-)colonial island axis.

The Hajj and the Hindi: The ascent of the Indian Sufi lodge in the Ottoman empire

2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (6) ◽  
pp. 1888-1931 ◽  
Author(s):  
RISHAD CHOUDHURY
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Social Success ◽  
Social Communications ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Institutional Network ◽  
Inter State

AbstractThis article charts several historical paths, hitherto underexplored, through the Hindi or ‘Indian’ Sufi lodges of the Ottoman empire. Focusing on the ‘long eighteenth century (circa1695–1808)’, it tracks their remarkable ascendance as an institutional network for mobile and migrant Indian Sufi pilgrims. From Istanbul to the provinces, the article demonstrates how Naqshbandis and Qadiris on the Hajj circuit drew on local channels of social communications, legal petitioning strategies, and state and inter-state linkages to forge unique identities as ‘trans-imperial subjects’ in an age of decentralization in the Ottoman world. I argue that central to their social success was the creation of new corporate regimes of itinerant piety. But first, I place the little-known lodges at the heart of a specific shift in early modern attitudes to identity, as the story behind ‘Hindi’ beckons wider inquiry into emergent differences among Sufi pilgrims in the Ottoman empire.

Palazzo Tè between Science and Imagination

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 429-461
Author(s):  
David Malkiel
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Recent Advances ◽  
Diffusion Of Knowledge ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Echo Chamber ◽  
Modern Europe

This study focuses on the observations of two eighteenth-century visitors to Mantua’s Palazzo Tè, Rabbis Isaac Lampronti of Ferrara (1679-1756) and Hayyim Yoseph David Azulay of Jerusalem (1724-1806), especially their impressions of the echo in its Chamber of the Giants. The rabbis’ response to Palazzo Tè closely resembles that of dozens other European travelers, whose writings about the echo chamber exhibit the same fascination with recent advances in scientific knowledge, and like them, Lampronti and Azulay labor to synthesize their experience with the traditions and beliefs that make up their worldview. The Palazzo Tè literature emblematizes the explosive increase in the diffusion of knowledge in early modern Europe, in the arts as well as the sciences, and the importance of travel and travel writing in that process.

Early Modern Socinianism and Unitarianism

2014 ◽  
pp. 360-372
Author(s):  
Sarah Mortimer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Christian Ethics ◽  
New Era ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Changing Attitudes ◽  
The Trinity

This essay describes the version of Christianity set out by Faustus Socinus, including his critique of the Trinity and the atonement, and his understanding of Christian ethics. It shows how his theology was taken up and developed by later Socinians, and describes how the role of reason in Socinian theology changed. The challenges which Socinianism posed to mainstream theology, especially in a period when new philosophies were being explored, are outlined. From the middle of the seventeenth century, Arian and then Unitarian ideas were heard, but these then receded into the background in the eighteenth century. It is suggested that the anti-Trinitarians benefited from changing attitudes toward philosophy and human nature during the Enlightenment, but that the French Revolution ushered in a new era of conservatism and hostility toward Socinianism and Unitarianism, at least in Europe.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document