Journeying to an Antique Christian Past

Pilgrimage treatises fulfilled many functions—as sacred histories, polemics, and aids to contemplation—but they were first and foremost modes of spiritual journeying designed to take devout Christians on a virtual visitation of the Holy Places. Through their vivid descriptions of the journey of the pilgrim to Jerusalem, early modern Catholic narratives purposefully concretized the Holy Land as the place where Christ lived and evoked the transformative impact for the pilgrim of being there. Just as importantly, these narratives embedded the Catholic tradition, in the form of Catholic altars, ornamentation, and rituals, in the very fabric of the Holy Places. These twin strategies, concretization and embedding, illuminate the impact of Reformation debate over the nature and locus of Christian authority upon members of the traditional Church. They show that many Catholics staked a claim to the legitimacy of the traditional Church in the place where Christ first plied his ministry.

Antiquarianism in the Near East

This chapter provides an account of Thomas Smith’s pioneering account of the archaeology of the ancient Near Eastern church, his Survey of the Seven Churches of Asia, first published in Latin in 1672. The book remained a huge influence on travellers to Asia Minor well into the nineteenth century, as clergymen and amateur archaeologists retraced Smith’s steps, with his book as guide. Drawing upon the vast archive of Smith’s letters and manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, the chapter places the book firmly in its original context, unpicking the complex interweaving of patronage, religion, and international scholarship which shaped the work. In the end, Smith’s book looks backwards and forwards: back to the traditions of seventeenth-century English confessionalized scholarship and orientalism, and forwards to later eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archaeological traditions. As such, this study sheds light on a pivotal moment in Western European approaches to the ancient Near East.

Assyria in Early Modern Historiography

This chapter provides a starting point for the understudied pre-nineteenth-century reception of Assyria. In early modern Europe, knowledge about ancient Assyria was mainly derived from a small pool of classical authors: an entirely textual tradition, centred around the figures of Semiramis and Sardanapalus, which was transmitted through strict repetition in late medieval and early modern history writing. The narrow scope and repetitive nature of this tradition raise questions for historiography—what kind of historical knowledge can be produced from such limited sources? And, crucially, what notions about Assyria can emerge here? By examining the treatment of Semiramis and Sardanapalus in three geographically and chronologically diverse case studies (Giovanni Boccaccio, Johannes Carion and Philip Melanchthon, and Walter Ralegh), this article sheds light on the negotiations between received practices and historiographical trends, the influence of moral imperatives and gendered logic, and establishes the longevity and pan-European spread of the historiographical tradition on Assyria.

Crises of Self and Succession

This chapter addresses the theatrical reception of the Persian king Cambyses II as portrayed in Herodotus book III. The Achaemenid madman, whose death without issue creates an acute succession crisis, plays a noteworthy part as the ‘star’ of two of the most successful theatre works between 1560 and 1667. The first is Thomas Preston’s The Lamentable Tragedy Mixed Full of Pleasant Mirth Containing the Life of Cambises King of Persia (1560 or 1561, the earliest surviving Elizabethan tragedy). The second is Elkanah Settle’s Restoration drama Cambyses (1667). It is argued that both plays project the conflicted early modern English self and its fractured religious and political psyche and that Settle’s play foreshadows the emergent eighteenth-century ‘She-Tragedy’ and ‘Sentimental Drama’, in which the fantasy of familial domestic harmony, and honourable love, were to become the theatre’s ideological counterpart of the British bourgeois settlement.

Reading Ancient Fables from the East

In his treatise on romance, Traitté de l’origine des romans (1670), Pierre-Daniel Huet’s argument that the genre originated in the ancient Near East seems to reconfirm the idea of a western translatio studii. However, Huet also argues for a second origin of romance in the West. Examining Huet in conjunction with two of his representative romances—Heliodorus’ Aethiopika, and the fables of Bidpai, or Indian Panchatantra—this chapter considers how early modern translatio offers a choice of two paths to western relations to the East: the first imagined as the ancient ideal of a cosmopolis of universal brotherhood while the other led to modern Orientalism. Straddling the historical boundary between antique romance and modern novel, Huet occupies a critical transitional position. Despite his apparent cosmopolitanism, in the end, Huet’s polygenetic theory of romance suggests the beginnings of the divergence of classicism from Orientalism with a nascent imperial mentality.

Alexander the Great in Early Modern English Drama

This chapter provides an overview of Alexander the Great in early modern English drama, as a popular but ambiguous emissary of the ancient near east. Alexander’s appeal and notoriety both in Europe and the across the Bosphorus meant that he became a voluble figure of global empire, representing both prevailing European imperial ambitions and their limitations. Drama proves a particularly rich place for exploration of these ambiguities. Highlighting a recurring fascination with imagining a dead Alexander (rather than the humanist exemplary model in life), early modern English drama regularly isolates the figure of Alexander for scrutiny through versions of the mise-en-abyme device, as a way of exploring the unreconciled tensions between the sometime humanist hero and the imperial villain.

Richard Verstegan and the Symbol of Babylon in the Early Modern Period

By the early modern period, the city of Babylon was in ruins, but it continued to loom large in the imagination. This chapter takes the English recusant printer, polemicist, and spy Richard Verstegan as the lens through which to examine the diverse iconography of Babylon in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Verstegan’s treatment of the Tower of Babel reflects contemporary interest in questions about the origins of language and nation, but he also employed it to explore issues of tyranny in early modern England. He reclaimed the image of the harlot from the stock Protestant identification of the Whore of Babylon with the Roman Church, and used the biblical exile of the Jews in Babylon to frame his own religious exile. The chapter places Verstegan alongside his contemporaries, from Spenser to Milton, illuminating their use of the image of Babylon through consideration of his treatment of this very flexible symbol.

From ‘Custom is King’ to ‘Custom is a Metal’

In early modernity, the ancient Scythians were mostly the subject of ethnographic tales that delighted audiences with their exoticism and barbarity. Yet in an exceptional development, one stereotypical Scythian trait—the resistance to foreign cultural influences—became associated with a wider sixteenth-century discourse about custom in its philosophical, religious, and legal dimensions. This discourse was utilized in the service of imperialist agendas that had to reckon with the durability and obduracy of native culture. In Edmund Spenser’s colonial dialogue A View of the State of Ireland, the Irish are presented as genealogical descendants of the Scythians and are reviled for adhering to their Scythian-like customs. Paradoxically drawing on Herodotus and Lucian, authors largely sympathetic to the Scythians, Spenser allows the cultural conservatism of the colonized to illuminate what he perceives as the cultural degeneracy of the colonists, and turns the quarrel about ethnographic custom into an interrogation of customary law.

The Well-Thumbed Attic Muse

This chapter looks at how Cicero’s comments on Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and Oeconomicus dictated the way early modern readers read these works and the Persian images they contained. Cicero considered the Cyropaedia a practical manual for leaders, presented in the guise of a fictional account of the life of Cyrus the Elder, the founder of the Persian Empire. The Oeconomicus, which contains a memorable vignette revealing the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger as a keen gardener, Cicero deemed held useful lessons for the honest enrichment of one’s household. Because the works containing these comments of Cicero were frequently used in early modern schools for the teaching of Latin, Cicero’s judgements on and paraphrases of Xenophon’s works became particularly ingrained in the memory of the educated classes, even down to the very language that he used, which was then reused in place of Xenophon’s own even when Xenophon’s texts became widely available.

Introduction

The Introduction maps out the ambitions and challenges for the collection of essays as a whole in foregrounding the many and varied significances of the ancient near east in early modern European classicism, across a range of disciplines. It describes the context of renewed European engagement—commercial, diplomatic, cultural—and exchange with the eastern Mediterranean, and the continued appeal of a host of classical works and authors describing that world in ancient times. It studies European familiarity with the material traces of that history—archaeological as well as textual—as well as the complex, often mediated routes of reception that texts of and about the ancient near east took. It highlights four key concepts or approaches to early modern studies that would benefit from closer attention to early modern familiarity with the ancient near east, and concludes by summarizing the key contributions of each essay in the collection.