Matthew Dimmock – författare

A broad-based and accessible anthology of travel and colonial writing in the English Renaissance, selected to represent the world-picture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers in England. It includes not just the narratives of discovery of the New World but also accounts of cultures already well known through trade links, such as Turkey and the Moluccan islands, and of places that featured just as significantly in the early modern English imagination: from Ireland to Russia and the Far East, from Calais to India and Africa, from France and Italy to the West Indies. The writings reveal painstaking attempts to understand the 'other' as well as ignorance and prejudice, surprising connections alongside phobic reactions to difference, the desire to co-operate alongside the desire to extinguish and exploit.The second edition of Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels is significantly revised and expanded, twenty years after the first edition helped to establish the field of travel and colonial writing in English. The anthology includes substantial new chapters of extracts on 'The North', detailing the important Arctic voyages and search for the elusive North-West Passage; 'Islamic West Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean', includes new material on Persia, Russia, and Jerusalem; 'England from Elsewhere' includes observations of England and the English from European travellers; and the epilogue on women travellers, explores the importance in particular of Lady Catherine Whetenhall's journey to Italy, recorded after her early death. The chapter on Africa includes new material on the Congo, Gambia, and Sierra Leone, and the chapter on East Asia and the South Seas contains new material on China and Japan. There are new images of West African figures and Sir Anthony and Lady Shirley in Persian courtly attire. The introduction has been carefully revised to take into account the wealth of scholarship on English perceptions of Asia and the Mediterranean, and the analysis of race and racial identity has been expanded in line with contemporary concerns. Headnotes and notes have been revised and expanded throughout the text. The anthology is the most comprehensive single-volume available in English, and, with its newly modernized text and reader-friendly apparatus, is designed to appeal to the general as well as the specialist reader. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of travel, colonial writing, and racial politics at the time of the first British Empire.

A broad-based and accessible anthology of travel and colonial writing in the English Renaissance, selected to represent the world-picture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers in England. It includes not just the narratives of discovery of the New World but also accounts of cultures already well known through trade links, such as Turkey and the Moluccan islands, and of places that featured just as significantly in the early modern English imagination: from Ireland to Russia and the Far East, from Calais to India and Africa, from France and Italy to the West Indies. The writings reveal painstaking attempts to understand the 'other' as well as ignorance and prejudice, surprising connections alongside phobic reactions to difference, the desire to co-operate alongside the desire to extinguish and exploit.The second edition of Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels is significantly revised and expanded, twenty years after the first edition helped to establish the field of travel and colonial writing in English. The anthology includes substantial new chapters of extracts on 'The North', detailing the important Arctic voyages and search for the elusive North-West Passage; 'Islamic West Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean', includes new material on Persia, Russia, and Jerusalem; 'England from Elsewhere' includes observations of England and the English from European travellers; and the epilogue on women travellers, explores the importance in particular of Lady Catherine Whetenhall's journey to Italy, recorded after her early death. The chapter on Africa includes new material on the Congo, Gambia, and Sierra Leone, and the chapter on East Asia and the South Seas contains new material on China and Japan. There are new images of West African figures and Sir Anthony and Lady Shirley in Persian courtly attire. The introduction has been carefully revised to take into account the wealth of scholarship on English perceptions of Asia and the Mediterranean, and the analysis of race and racial identity has been expanded in line with contemporary concerns. Headnotes and notes have been revised and expanded throughout the text. The anthology is the most comprehensive single-volume available in English, and, with its newly modernized text and reader-friendly apparatus, is designed to appeal to the general as well as the specialist reader. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of travel, colonial writing, and racial politics at the time of the first British Empire.

Mapping the World at the Dawn of the British Empire is a compact and informative guide to the ways in which the world was understood and imagined by British travellers and readers in the Tudor and Jacobean period, just before the rapid expansion of the transoceanic British Empire from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. The book shows how the relatively restricted English-speaking world understood different people and places, sometimes through direct encounters, more often through descriptions and travel narratives. The book covers British perceptions of the diverse cultures of the world known to them in the early seventeenth century, from Paris to the South Sea Islands; from the earliest precarious colonies established in the Americas to the mighty Ottoman and Chinese empires; from the frozen north as sailors vainly sought to open up new trade routes by discovering the north-west or north-east passages, to the arid deserts of the Sahara; from the rich fishing grounds of the Baltic and the North Atlantic to the mythical kingdom of Prester John, the fabled golden city of El Dorado and the hidden societies of the dangerous women warriors, the Amazons. The book shows that British readers encountered a vision of the world that simultaneously represented them as specially selected white Christians, superior to other peoples, but also reminded them how dependent they were on other peoples, whose territories produced such vast riches. Reading these accounts of travel, trade, and colonialism demonstrates that English speakers realized how much they had to learn if their nations were to survive and flourish, as well as the possibilities for accumulating wealth through trade and conquest. The book is divided into six chapters, each prefaced by a contemporary map: Europe, The North, Islamic West Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean, East Asia and the South Seas, Africa, and The Americas. There is an introduction, a conclusion, a bibliographical essay, and a guide explaining how to use the book. There are also 35 illustrations, comprising of maps, portraits, and images of relevant objects discussed in the text.

The intellectual culture of the English country house is a ground-breaking collection of essays by leading and emerging scholars, which uncovers the vibrant intellectual life of early modern provincial England. The essays in the volume explore architectural planning; libraries and book collecting; landscape gardening; interior design; the history of science and scientific experimentation; and the collection of portraits and paintings. The essays demonstrate the significance of the English country house (e.g. Knole House, Castle Howard, Penshurst Place) and its place within larger local cultures that it helped to create and shape. They provide a substantial overview of the country house culture of early modern England and the complicated relationship between the provinces and the national, the country and the city, in a period of rapid social, intellectual and economic transformation. It will appeal to anyone interested in the culture of the country house and its place in early modern England.

Early Modern England was obsessed with the 'turke'. Following the first Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1529 the printing presses brought endless prayer sheets, pamphlets and books concerning this 'infidel' threat before the public in the vernacular for the first time. As this body of knowledge increased, stimulated by a potent combination of domestic politics, further Ottoman incursions and trade, English notions of Islam and of the 'turke' became nuanced in a way that begins to question the rigid assumptions of traditional critical enquiry. New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England explores the ways in which print culture helped define and promulgate a European construction of 'Turkishness' that was nebulous and ever shifting. By placing in context the developing encounters between the Ottoman and Christian worlds, it shows how ongoing engagements reflected the nature of the 'Turke' in sixteenth century English literature. By offering readings of texts by artists, poets and playwrights - especially canonical figures like Kyd, Marlowe and Shakespeare - a bewildering variety of approaches to Islam and the 'turke' is revealed fundamentally questioning any dominant, defining narrative of 'otherness'. In so doing, this book demonstrates how continuing English encounters, both real and fictional, with Muslims complicated the notion of the 'Turke'. It also shows how the Anglo-Ottoman relationship - which was at its peak in the mid-1590s - was viewed with suspicion by Catholic Europe, particularly the apparent ritual and devotional similarities between England's reformed church and Islam. That the 'new turkes' were not Ottoman Muslims, but English Protestants, serves as a timely riposte to the decisive rhetoric of contemporary conflicts and modern scholarly assumption.

William Percy's Mahomet and His Heaven (1601) is extraordinary. Not only is it the only early modern play purportedly based upon the Qur'an, but it is also the first to place the Prophet Muhammad on the stage. While there existed a remarkable range of texts concerning Islamic characters and themes in Renaissance England, from chronicles and pamphlets to popular drama, the publication of this edition of Mahomet and His Heaven represents a major step forward in the study of Islam on the early modern stage. Roughly contemporary with Shakespeare's Othello, William Percy makes the remarkable and potentially highly provocative gesture of locating the Prophet as its central character, presiding over an apocalyptic drought to chastise the sins of mankind. The play takes place in around the mosques of 'Medina' and the action mirrors early Christian 'translations' of the Qur'an, the Islamic holy text that was rarely available in England at the time. Furthermore, the play provides a fascinating insight into the way that Islamic characters were portrayed on the early modern stage, containing as it does remarkably detailed stage directions, stipulating for example that the Prophet wears 'all greene and greene his Turban' and that his Angels are 'rainbow powdered'. Such details offer an entirely new perspective upon this aspect of early modern stagecraft. Matthew Dimmock presents here the play in its entirety, with a critical introduction which introduces some of its key themes, and places it in a textual and social context. A section of detailed explanatory scholarly notes follow the play, containing a full translation of the short Latin sections and references to the many political and literary parallels. This book should be required reading for historians, literary scholars and students dealing with notions of race, religion, magic, astrology and stagecraft in early modern England.

1978 witnessed the publication of Peter Burke's groundbreaking study Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Now in its third edition this remarkable book has for thirty years set the benchmark for cultural historians with its wide ranging and imaginative exploration of early modern European popular culture. In order to celebrate this achievement, and to explore the ways in which perceptions of popular culture have changed in the intervening years a group of leading scholars are brought together in this new volume to examine Burke's thesis in relation to England. Adopting an appropriately interdisciplinary approach, the collection offers an unprecedented survey of the field of popular culture in early modern England as it currently stands, bringing together scholars at the forefront of developments in an expanding area. Taking as its starting point Burke's argument that popular culture was everyone's culture, distinguishing it from high culture, which only a restricted social group could access, it explores an intriguing variety of sources to discover whether this was in fact the case in early modern England. It further explores the meaning and significance of the term 'popular culture' when applied to the early modern period: how did people distinguish between high and low culture - could they in fact do so? Concluded by an Afterword by Peter Burke, the volume provides a vivid sense of the range and significance of early modern popular culture and the difficulties involved in defining and studying it.

Richard Eden's Decades has long been recognised as a landmark in the translation and circulation of information concerning the Americas in England. What is often overlooked in Eden's book is the presence of the first two Tudor voyage accounts to have been committed to print, assembled in haste and added late in the printing process. Both concern English commercial ventures to the West African coast, undertaken despite vehement Portuguese protests and in the midst of the profound alteration of the Marian succession. Both are complex, contradictory, and innovative experiments in generic form and content. This Element closely examines Eden's assembly and framing of these accounts, engaging with issues of material culture, travel writing, new knowledge, race, and the negotiation of political and religious change. In the process it repositions West Africa and Eden at the heart of a lost history of early English expansionism.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary examination of current research on popular culture in the early modern era. For the first time a detailed yet wide-ranging consideration of the breadth and scope of early modern popular culture in England is collected in one volume, highlighting the interplay of 'low' and 'high' modes of cultural production (while also questioning the validity of such terminology). The authors examine how popular culture impacted upon people's everyday lives during the period, helping to define how individuals and groups experienced the world. Issues as disparate as popular reading cultures, games, food and drink, time, textiles, religious belief and superstition, and the function of festivals and rituals are discussed. This research companion will be an essential resource for scholars and students of early modern history and culture.

The figure of 'Mahomet' was widely known in early modern England. A grotesque version of the Prophet Muhammad, Mahomet was a product of vilification, caricature and misinformation placed at the centre of Christian conceptions of Islam. In Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture Matthew Dimmock draws on an eclectic range of early modern sources - literary, historical, visual - to explore the nature and use of Mahomet in a period bounded by the beginnings of print and the early Enlightenment. This fabricated figure and his spurious biography were endlessly recycled, but also challenged and vindicated, and the tales the English told about him offer new perspectives on their sense of the world - its geographies and religions, near and far - and their place within it. This book explores the role played by Mahomet in the making of Englishness, and reflects on what this might reveal about England's present circumstances.

Art, Literature and Religion in Early Modern Sussex is an interdisciplinary study of a county at the forefront of religious, political and artistic developments in early-modern England. Ranging from the schism of Reformation to the outbreak of Civil War, the volume brings together scholars from the fields of art history, religious and intellectual history and English literature to offer new perspectives on early-modern Sussex. Essays discuss a wide variety of topics: the coherence of a county divided between East and West and Catholic and Protestant; the art and literary collections of Chichester cathedral; communities of Catholic gentry; Protestant martyrdom; aristocratic education; writing, preaching and exile; local funerary monuments; and the progresses of Elizabeth I. Contributors include Michael Questier; Nigel Llewellyn; Caroline Adams; Karen Coke; and Andrew Foster. The collection concludes with an Afterword by Duncan Salkeld (University of Chichester). This volume extends work done in the 1960s and 70s on early-modern Sussex, drawing on new work on county and religious identities, and setting it into a broad national context. The result is a book that not only tells us much about Sussex, but which also has a great deal to offer all scholars working in the field of local and regional history, and religious change in England as a whole.

The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary examination of current research on popular culture in the early modern era. For the first time a detailed yet wide-ranging consideration of the breadth and scope of early modern popular culture in England is collected in one volume, highlighting the interplay of 'low' and 'high' modes of cultural production (while also questioning the validity of such terminology). The authors examine how popular culture impacted upon people's everyday lives during the period, helping to define how individuals and groups experienced the world. Issues as disparate as popular reading cultures, games, food and drink, time, textiles, religious belief and superstition, and the function of festivals and rituals are discussed. This research companion will be an essential resource for scholars and students of early modern history and culture.

Art, Literature and Religion in Early Modern Sussex is an interdisciplinary study of a county at the forefront of religious, political and artistic developments in early-modern England. Ranging from the schism of Reformation to the outbreak of Civil War, the volume brings together scholars from the fields of art history, religious and intellectual history and English literature to offer new perspectives on early-modern Sussex. Essays discuss a wide variety of topics: the coherence of a county divided between East and West and Catholic and Protestant; the art and literary collections of Chichester cathedral; communities of Catholic gentry; Protestant martyrdom; aristocratic education; writing, preaching and exile; local funerary monuments; and the progresses of Elizabeth I. Contributors include Michael Questier; Nigel Llewellyn; Caroline Adams; Karen Coke; and Andrew Foster. The collection concludes with an Afterword by Duncan Salkeld (University of Chichester). This volume extends work done in the 1960s and 70s on early-modern Sussex, drawing on new work on county and religious identities, and setting it into a broad national context. The result is a book that not only tells us much about Sussex, but which also has a great deal to offer all scholars working in the field of local and regional history, and religious change in England as a whole.

Now available in paperback, The intellectual culture of the English country house is a ground-breaking collection of essays by leading and emerging scholars, which uncovers the vibrant intellectual life of early modern provincial England. The essays explore architectural planning; libraries and book collecting; landscape gardening; interior design; the history of science and scientific experimentation; and the collection of portraits and paintings. The volume demonstrate the significance of the English country house (e.g. Knole House, Castle Howard, Penshurst Place) and its place within larger local cultures that it helped to create and shape. It provides a substantial overview of the country house culture of early modern England and the complicated relationship between the provinces and the national, the country and the city, in a period of rapid social, intellectual and economic transformation.