Dialectics of Orientalism in Early Modern Europe

Marcus Keller is Associate Professor of French at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. In his research he focuses on sixteenth and seventeenth-century French literature and culture. He is the author of Figurations of France: Literary Nation-Building in Times of Crisis (1550-1650) (2011) and editor of The Turk of Early Modern France (2013).Javier Irigoyen-García is Associate Professor of Spanish Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. His research focuses on the representation of race and ethnicity in early modern Spain. He has published The Spanish Arcadia: Sheep Herding, Pastoral Discourse, and Ethnicity in Early Modern Spain (2013) and the forthcoming “Moors Dressed as Moors”: Clothing, Social Distinction, and Ethnicity in Early Modern Iberia.

“This edited volume is a valid contribution and insight into how the early modern humanists of European geography have conceptualized the Oriental and what devices and approaches they have exploited to understand the Other. Similarly important, this volume sheds light onto how the humanists of the period have negotiated scholarly, aesthetic, political, and religious concerns in their works.” (Oriol Guni,KULT_online - Review Journal for the Study of Culture, Issue 58, April, 2019)

• Introduction.- Part I. ORIENTALIST EPISTEMOLOGIES.- “A Captive Library between Morocco and Spain” (Oumelbanine Zhiri).- “Political Pragmatism, Humanist Ideals, and Early Modern Orientalism in Busbecq’s Turkish Letters” (Kaya Şahin).- “Competing Forms of Knowledge in Adam Olearius’s Orientalische Reise (1647)” (Aigi Heero and Maris Saagpakk).- Part II. EMPIRE AND ITS ORIENTS.- “The Discourse on the Chinese and Muslim Worlds in the Hispanic Empire (New Spain and Castile, 1550-1650)” (José L. Gasch-Tomás and Natalia Maillard Álvarez).- “Mapping Islam in the Philippines: Moro Anxieties of the Spanish Empire in the Pacific” (Ana María Rodríguez-Rodríguez).- “The Invention of Europe and the Intellectual Struggle for Political Imagination: Spanish Humanism on the Ottomans” (Natalio Ohanna).- Part III. ORIENTALISM AND THE IDEA OF EUROPE.- “Europe, France, and the Ottoman Empire in the Essais: Montaigne’s Dialectics” (Marcus Keller).- “Mehmed II and His Woman: The Idea of Europe in Early Modern Representations of a Female Captive” (David Moberly).- “Was There a Pan-European Orientalism? Icelandic and Flemish Perspectives on Captivity in Muslim North Africa (1628-1656)” (Toby Wikström).- Part IV. VISUAL DIALECTICS.- “Christian of Ottoman Europe in Sixteenth-Century Costume Books” (Robyn D. Radway).- “Amazon Battle and the Seventeenth-Century Antwerp Painting Canon” (Lisa Rosenthal).- “The Architectural Setting of ‘Empire’: the English Experience of Ottoman Spectacle in the Late Seventeenth Century and Its Consequences” (Lydia M. Soo)