Early Modern Encounters with the Islamic East

Sabine Schülting is Professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.Sabine Lucia Müller is currently employed as director's assistant at George Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in Braunschweig, Germany. Ralf Hertel is Professor of English Literature at the University of Trier, Germany.

'This collection brings together a multidisciplinary set of essays drawing on performance studies and performativity theory to assess western European cultural encounters with the Islamic east during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Original contributions on diplomatic and mercantile performances, global commodity exchange and the stage, and dramatic productions ranging across media and extending from the early modern to the postmodern deepen the substantial body of criticism on this encounter and offer new approaches through material culture, art history, and musicology.' Bernadette Andrea, Department of English, University of Texas at San Antonio, author of Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature '... this volume is to be welcomed for its expansion of the subject into a wide range of areas, and for covering this fascinating and multi-faceted topic under one roof...' Review of English Studies '... the editors Sabine Schülting, Sabine Lucia Müller, and Ralf Hertel have made an excellent contribution to the flourishing scholarship on Anglo-Islamic encounters in literary studies ... This collection is surely a great intervention into the conversations about transculturalism, global economies, and cross-cultural encounters in a wide array of disciplines from literary and cultural studies, to history, geography, music, and history of art.' Renaissance Quarterly

• Contents: Preface; Introduction: cultures at play, Sabine Schülting, Sabine Lucia Müller and Ralf Hertel; Part 1 Players and Playgrounds: William Harborne's embassies: scripting, performing and editing Anglo-Ottoman diplomacy, Sabine Lucia Müller; Performing at the Ottoman Porte in 1599: the case of Henry Lello, Gerald MacLean; Command performances: early English traders in Arabia Felix, Richmond Barbour; Strategic improvisation: Henry Blount in the Ottoman Empire, Sabine Schülting. Part 2 Props and Costumes: English women in oriental dress: playing the Turk in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters and Daniel Defoe's Roxana, Susanne Scholz; Painting the 'orient'? Dosso Dossi's Melissa, Wibke Joswig; Materialising Islam on the early modern English stage, Matthew Dimmock. Part 3 Encounters on Stage: Ousting the Ottomans: the double vision of the East in The Travels of the Three English Brothers (1607), Ralf Hertel; Claudio Monteverdi's Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (1624 or 1625): a Christian-Muslim encounter in music?, Clemens Risi; After Orientalism? Post-September 11 culturalisms at play in Bambiland and The Persians, Claudia Breger; Bibliography; Index.