The confrontation between European countries and the expanding Ottoman Empire in the early modern era has played a major role in numerous fields of history. The aim of this book is to investigate the European-Ottoman interrelations from three angles. One deals with the circumstances: How did the Europeans meet the Turks in pragmatic and diplomatic connections? Another concerns imagery: how were the Turks depicted in literature and art? The third examines performativity: how were the Turks inserted into plays, operas and ceremonies? This book confronts mental, visual and embodied images with historical positions and conditions. The focus, therefore, is on the dynamic interactive processes of experience, embodiment and imagination in context. Bringing together Turkish and European scholars, it applies a number of research strategies used by historians to the history of art, literature, music and theatre. Contributions by Pál Ács | Robert Born | Asli Çirakman | Anne Duprat | Kate Fleet | Bent Holm | Marcus Keller | Maria Pia Pedani | Mogens Pelt | Mikael Bøgh Rasmussen | Günsel Renda | Pia Schwarz Lausten | Charlotte Colding Smith | Suna Suner | Dirk Van Waelderen

This book provides a comprehensive assessment of Dürer’s depictions of human diversity, focusing particularly on his depictions of figures from outside his Western European milieu. Heather Madar contextualizes those depictions within their broader artistic and historical context and assesses them in light of current theories about early modern concepts of cultural, ethnic, religious and racial diversity. The book also explores Dürer’s connections with contemporaries, his later legacy with respect to his imagery of the other and the broader significance of Nuremberg to early modern engagements with the world beyond Europe. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance studies and Renaissance history.

As a geo-historical place, the beach integrates a variety of characteristics and functions so multiple that they tend to contradict each other. The beach is both a place of work and trade but also of leisure; it is both a place of therapy and health but also of migration, war, and death; it is a place of mass tourism and boredom but also the place of experiencing the Other; it is a public place but also an uncivilized and desolate place. This book studies the literary representation of the beach from ancient Greek literature up until today, drawing on English, French, Italian, American, and Spanish literatures from various periods and genres and presenting multiple ways of comparing and understanding literary beaches as a ubiquitous literary phenomenon. It demonstrates how the literary beach as a both geo-historical place and as an aesthetic literary commonplace has been a constant and privileged resource for the analysis of more general existential, sociological, and moral problems. This is the case when for instance the Tahitian beach becomes the place of the "already modern" in Stevenson's tales, or when the Italian beach becomes a question of modern feminism in Ferrante. In this sense, literature expands the local or national beach by articulating its transnational complexities.

In the late 16th century, hundreds of travelers made their way to the Habsburg ambassador's residence, known as the German House, in Constantinople. In this centrally located inn, subjects of the emperor found food, wine, shelter, and good company—and left an incredible collection of albums filled with images, messages, decorated papers, and more. Portraits of Empires offers a complete account of this early form of social media, which had a profound impact on later European iconography. Revealing a vibrant transimperial culture as viewed from all walks of life—Muslim and Christian, noble and servant, scholar and stable boy—the pocket-sized albums containing these curiosities have never been fully connected to the abundant archival records on the German House and its residents. Robyn Dora Radway not only introduces these objects, the people who filled their pages, and the house at the center of their creation, but she also presents several arguments regarding chronologies of exchange, workshop practices, the curation of social networks and visual collections based on status, and the purposes of these highly individualized material portraits. Featuring 162 fascinating color images, Portraits of Empires reconstructs the world of Habsburg subjects living in Ottoman Constantinople using a rich and distinctive set of objects to raise questions about imperial belonging and the artistic practices used to articulate it.

Diplomats had multiple tasks: not only negotiating with the representatives of other states, but also mediating culture and knowledge, and not least elaborating reports on their observations of politics, society, and culture. Culture, according to the studies featured in this book, is defined as a complex sphere including aspects like systems of communication, literature, music, arts, education, and the creation of knowledge. This edition containing contributions from six conferences held in Vienna and Istanbul by the Don Juan Archiv Wien focuses on the complex diplomatic and cultural relations between the Ottoman Empire and Europe from the time of the early embassies to Istanbul up to "Tanzimat".

Musical representations of Europe in myth and allegory are well known, but when and under what circumstances did the words "European" and "music" become linked together? What did the resulting term mean in music before 1800 and how did it evolve into the label "Western music," which features so prominently in pedagogical and scholarly discourses? In The Making of European Music in the Long Eighteenth Century, author D. R. M. Irving traces the emergence of such large-scale categories in Western European thought. Beginning in the 1670s, Jesuit missionaries in China began to refer to "European music," and for the next hundred years the term appeared almost exclusively in comparison with musics from other parts of the world. It entered common use from the 1770s, and in the 1830s became synonymous with a new concept of "Western music." Western European writers also associated these terms with notions of "progress" and "perfection." Meanwhile, changing ideas about "modern" Europe's cultural relationship with classical antiquity, together with theories that systematically and condescendingly racialized people from other continents, influenced the ways that these scholars imagined and interpreted musical pasts around the globe. Irving weaves his analyses throughout the book's historical examinations, suggesting that "European music" originates from self-fashioning in contexts of intercultural comparison outside the continent, rather than from the resolution of national aesthetic differences within it. He shows that "Western music" as understood today arose in line with the growth of Orientalism and increasing awareness of musics of "the East." All such reductive terms often imply homogeneity and essentialism, and Irving asks what a reassessment of their beginnings might mean for music history. Taken as a whole, the book shows how a renewed critique of primary sources can help dismantle historiographical constructs that arose within narratives of musical pasts involving Europe.

This book examines how Ottomans were mapped in the narrative and visual imagination of early modern Europe's Christian kingdoms.

"In "The Turk" in the Czech Imagination (1870s-1923), Jitka Malečková describes Czechs' views of the Turks in the last half century of the existence of the Ottoman Empire and how they were influenced by ideas and trends in other countries, including the European fascination with the Orient, images of "the Turk," contemporary scholarship, and racial theories. The Czechs were not free from colonial ambitions either, as their attitude to Bosnia-Herzegovina demonstrates, but their viewpoint was different from that found in imperial states and among the peoples who had experienced Ottoman rule. The book convincingly shows that the Czechs mainly viewed the Turks through the lenses of nationalism and Pan-Slavism - in solidarity with the Slavs fighting against Ottoman rule"--

Uniting twelve original studies by scholars of early modern history, literature, and the arts, this collection is the first that foregrounds the dialectical quality of early modern Orientalism by taking a broad interdisciplinary perspective. Dialectics of Orientalism demonstrates how texts and images of the sixteenth and seventeenth century from across Europe and the New World are better understood as part of a dynamic and transformative orientalist discourse rather than a manifestation of the supposed dichotomy between the 'East' and the 'West.' The volume's central claim is that early modern orientalist discourses are fundamentally open, self-critical, and creative. Analyzing a varied corpus-from German and Dutch travelogues to Spanish humanist treaties, French essays, Flemish paintings, and English diaries-this collection thus breathes fresh air into the critique of Orientalism and provides productive new perspectives for the study of east-west and indeed globalized exchanges in the early modern world.

The first English translation of a comprehensive legal history of Europe from the early middle ages to the twentieth century, encompassing both the common aspects and the original developments of different countries. As well as legal scholars and professionals, it will appeal to those interested in the general history of European civilisation.