This Element develops and showcases a new methodological framework in which to study the connections between early modern travel writing and life- and self-writing. Turning the scholarly focus in the study of travel writing from eye-witnessing and proto-ethnography of foreign lands to the 'fashioned' and portrayed selves and 'inner worlds' of travellers – personal memory, autobiographical practices, and lived yet often heavily mediated travel experiences – it opens up perspectives to travel writing in its many modes, that extend both before and after 'lived' travels into their many pre- and afterlives in textual form. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Based on travel writings, religious history and popular literature, Jews in the Early Modern English Imagination explores the encounter between English travellers and the Jews. While literary and religious traditions created an image of Jews as untrustworthy, even sinister, travellers came to know them in their many and diverse communities with rich traditions and intriguing life-styles. The Jew of the imagination encountered the Jew of town and village, in southern Europe, North Africa and the Levant. Coming from an England riven by religious disputes and often by political unrest, travellers brought their own questions about identity, national character, religious belief and the quality of human relations to their encounter with 'the scattered nation'.
British travellers regarded all inhabitants of the seventeenth-century Ottoman empire as ‘slaves of the sultan’, yet they also made fine distinctions between them. This book provides the first historical account of how British travellers understood the non-Muslim peoples they encountered in Ottoman lands, and of how they perceived and described them in the mediating shadow of the Turks. In doing so it changes our perceptions of the European encounter with the Ottomans by exploring the complex identities of the subjects of the Ottoman empire in the English imagination, de-centering the image of the ‘Terrible Turk’ and Islam.
Based on travel writings, religious history and popular literature, Jews in the Early Modern English Imagination explores the encounter between English travellers and the Jews. While literary and religious traditions created an image of Jews as untrustworthy, even sinister, travellers came to know them in their many and diverse communities with rich traditions and intriguing life-styles. The Jew of the imagination encountered the Jew of town and village, in southern Europe, North Africa and the Levant. Coming from an England riven by religious disputes and often by political unrest, travellers brought their own questions about identity, national character, religious belief and the quality of human relations to their encounter with 'the scattered nation'.
British travellers regarded all inhabitants of the seventeenth-century Ottoman empire as ‘slaves of the sultan’, yet they also made fine distinctions between them. This book provides the first historical account of how British travellers understood the non-Muslim peoples they encountered in Ottoman lands, and of how they perceived and described them in the mediating shadow of the Turks. In doing so it changes our perceptions of the European encounter with the Ottomans by exploring the complex identities of the subjects of the Ottoman empire in the English imagination, de-centering the image of the ‘Terrible Turk’ and Islam.
This Element develops and showcases a new methodological framework in which to study the connections between early modern travel writing and life- and self-writing. Turning the scholarly focus in the study of travel writing from eye-witnessing and proto-ethnography of foreign lands to the 'fashioned' and portrayed selves and 'inner worlds' of travellers – personal memory, autobiographical practices, and lived yet often heavily mediated travel experiences – it opens up perspectives to travel writing in its many modes, that extend both before and after 'lived' travels into their many pre- and afterlives in textual form. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
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