Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture

Matthew Dimmock is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Sussex.

'Dr Dimmock has broken new ground, not only in his excavation of neglected English sources from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but also by his close reading of a wider range of writings than has hitherto been assembled in one place … This book furnishes a detailed and vivid sense of the varied ways in which the early modern English constructed and used the person of Mahomet/Muhammad in the articulation of their own identities, world views and notions of self. As such, it provides a suggestive and instructive point of reference and of self-interrogation for any reader inclined to a historically grounded and culturally contextualized understanding of the many and often-fraught ongoing twenty-first-century Western engagements with the Prophet of Islam.' Shahab Ahmed, Harvard University

• Preface; Acknowledgements; List of illustrations; Introduction: fabricating Mahomet; Part I. 'Well Rehearsed' in 'Books Old': Early Print and the Life of Mahomet: 1. From Polychronicon to The Golden Legend (and back); 2. The Fall of Princes; 3. Sir John Mandeville and the Travels; 4. Mahomet and the exclusive polemic; Part II. Most Like to Mahomet: Religious History and Reformation Mutability: 5. Preaching equivalence; 6. Painted words: Mahomet in the late sixteenth-century histories; Part III. Old Mahomet's Head: Idols, Papists and Mortus Ali on the English Stage: 7. Romance and idolatry; 8. Islamic idols and stage Mahomets; 9. Mahomet, Mortus Ally and the Pope; Part IV. Bunyan's Dilemma: Seventeenth-Century Imposture, Liberty and True Mahomets: 10. The fables and the fabler; 11. Imposturae; 12. A stupendous revolution; Conclusion: Mahomet discovered; Bibliography; Index.