In The Dragoman Renaissance, E. Natalie Rothman traces how Istanbul-based diplomatic translator-interpreters, known as the dragomans, systematically engaged Ottoman elites in the study of the Ottoman Empire—eventually coalescing in the discipline of Orientalism—throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rothman challenges Eurocentric assumptions still pervasive in Renaissance studies by showing the centrality of Ottoman imperial culture to the articulation of European knowledge about the Ottomans. To do so, she draws on a dazzling array of new material from a variety of archives. By studying the sustained interactions between dragomans and Ottoman courtiers in this period, Rothman disrupts common ideas about a singular moment of "cultural encounter," as well as about a "docile" and "static" Orient, simply acted upon by extraneous imperial powers. The Dragoman Renaissance creatively uncovers how dragomans mediated Ottoman ethno-linguistic, political, and religious categories to European diplomats and scholars. Further, it shows how dragomans did not simply circulate fixed knowledge. Rather, their engagement of Ottoman imperial modes of inquiry and social reproduction shaped the discipline of Orientalism for centuries to come. Thanks to generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, through The Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

In The Dragoman Renaissance, E. Natalie Rothman traces how Istanbul-based diplomatic translator-interpreters, known as the dragomans, systematically engaged Ottoman elites in the study of the Ottoman Empire—eventually coalescing in the discipline of Orientalism—throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rothman challenges Eurocentric assumptions still pervasive in Renaissance studies by showing the centrality of Ottoman imperial culture to the articulation of European knowledge about the Ottomans. To do so, she draws on a dazzling array of new material from a variety of archives. By studying the sustained interactions between dragomans and Ottoman courtiers in this period, Rothman disrupts common ideas about a singular moment of "cultural encounter," as well as about a "docile" and "static" Orient, simply acted upon by extraneous imperial powers. The Dragoman Renaissance creatively uncovers how dragomans mediated Ottoman ethno-linguistic, political, and religious categories to European diplomats and scholars. Further, it shows how dragomans did not simply circulate fixed knowledge. Rather, their engagement of Ottoman imperial modes of inquiry and social reproduction shaped the discipline of Orientalism for centuries to come. Thanks to generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, through The Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

Michelangelo’s adventure in Constantinople, from the “mesmerizing” (New Yorker) and “masterful” (Washington Post) author of Compass In 1506, Michelangelo—a young but already renowned sculptor—is invited by the sultan of Constantinople to design a bridge over the Golden Horn. The sultan has offered, along with an enormous payment, the promise of immortality, since Leonardo da Vinci’s design was rejected: “You will surpass him in glory if you accept, for you will succeed where he has failed, and you will give the world a monument without equal.” Michelangelo, after some hesitation, flees Rome and an irritated Pope Julius II—whose commission he leaves unfinished—and arrives in Constantinople for this truly epic project. Once there, he explores the beauty and wonder of the Ottoman Empire, sketching and describing his impressions along the way, as he struggles to create what could be his greatest architectural masterwork. Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants—constructed from real historical fragments—is a thrilling page-turner about why stories are told, why bridges are built, and how seemingly unmatched fragments, seen from the opposite sides of civilization, can mirror one another.

The story of a Venetian-Albanian family in the late sixteenth century forms the basis of a sweeping account of the interaction between East and West Europe and the Ottoman Empire at a pivotal moment in history.

In a book that draws attention to some of our most familiar and unquestioned habits of thought—from "framing" to "perspective" to "reflection"—Rayna Kalas suggests that metaphors of the poetic imagination were once distinctly material and technical in character. Kalas explores the visual culture of the English Renaissance by way of the poetic image, showing that English writers avoided charges of idolatry and fancy through conceits that were visual, but not pictorial. Frames, mirrors, and windows have been pervasive and enduring metaphors for texts from classical antiquity to modernity; as a result, those metaphors seem universally to emphasize the mimetic function of language, dividing reality from the text that represents it. This book dissociates those metaphors from their earlier and later formulations in order to demonstrate that figurative language was material in translating signs and images out of a sacred and iconic context and into an aesthetic and representational one. Reading specific poetic images—in works by Spenser, Shakespeare, Gascoigne, Bacon, and Nashe—together with material innovations in frames and glass, Kalas reveals both the immanence and the agency of figurative language in the early modern period. Frame, Glass, Verse shows, finally, how this earlier understanding of poetic language has been obscured by a modern idea of framing that has structured our apprehension of works of art, concepts, and even historical periods. Kalas presents archival research in the history of frames, mirrors, windows, lenses, and reliquaries that will be of interest to art historians, cultural theorists, historians of science, and literary critics alike. Throughout Frame, Glass, Verse, she challenges readers to rethink the relationship of poetry to technology.

This book investigates perceptions, modes, and techniques of Venetian rule in the early modern Eastern Mediterranean (1400–1700). Against the backdrop of the controversial notion of the Venetian realm as a colonial empire, essays from a range of specialists examine how Venice negotiated control over the territories, resources, and traditions of different empires (Byzantine, Roman, Mamluk, Ottoman) while developing its own claims of authority. Focusing in particular on questions of belonging and status in the Venetian overseas territories, the volume incorporates observations on the daily realities of Venetian rule: how did Venice negotiate claims of authority in light of former and ongoing imperial belongings? What was the status of colonial subjects and ships in the metropolis and in foreign territories? In what ways did Venice accept and continue old forms of imperial belonging? Did subordinate entities join in a shared communal identity? The volume opens new perspectives on Venetian rule at the crossroads of empire and early modern statehood: a polity negotiating and entangling empire. Contributors are Housni Alkhateeb Shehada, Georg Christ, Giacomo Corazzol, Nicholas Davidson, Renard Gluzman, Deborah Howard, David Jacoby (z’’l), Marianna Kolyvà, Franz-Julius Morche, Reinhold C. Mueller, Monique O’Connell, Gerassimos D. Pagratis, Tassos Papacostas, Maria Pia Pedani (†), Dorit Raines, and E. Natalie Rothman.

"It is clear that Renaissance artists and their patrons were interested in Ravenna's buildings and their decorations, both before Vasari's negative pronouncements and after them. Contemporary European travelers and diarists have left descriptions of the city's heritage, by then in ruinous condition. What happens if we reinsert this corpus of Ravenna's treasures and their multiple imbrications into our histories of Renaissance art? How can our narratives change if we trace and study an almost forgotten, albeit rich and articulated series of intersections between Ravenna's splendors and ambitious works of art and architecture from early modern Italy? These instances of creative imitations and recreations can best be recovered if we focus on the Renaissance production and humanists' accounts of the city's treasures, that is, works in various media and size, to map out an extended dimension of early modern visual culture."--Page 4 of printed paper wrapper.

Ancient and medieval labyrinths embody paradox, according to Penelope Reed Doob. Their structure allows a double perspective—the baffling, fragmented prospect confronting the maze-treader within, and the comprehensive vision available to those without. Mazes simultaneously assert order and chaos, artistry and confusion, articulated clarity and bewildering complexity, perfected pattern and hesitant process. In this handsomely illustrated book, Doob reconstructs from a variety of literary and visual sources the idea of the labyrinth from the classical period through the Middle Ages. Doob first examines several complementary traditions of the maze topos, showing how ancient historical and geographical writings generate metaphors in which the labyrinth signifies admirable complexity, while poetic texts tend to suggest that the labyrinth is a sign of moral duplicity. She then describes two common models of the labyrinth and explores their formal implications: the unicursal model, with no false turnings, found almost universally in the visual arts; and the multicursal model, with blind alleys and dead ends, characteristic of literary texts. This paradigmatic clash between the labyrinths of art and of literature becomes a key to the metaphorical potential of the maze, as Doob's examination of a vast array of materials from the classical period through the Middle Ages suggests. She concludes with linked readings of four "labyrinths of words": Virgil's Aeneid, Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, Dante's Divine Comedy, and Chaucer's House of Fame, each of which plays with and transforms received ideas of the labyrinth as well as reflecting and responding to aspects of the texts that influenced it. Doob not only provides fresh theoretical and historical perspectives on the labyrinth tradition, but also portrays a complex medieval aesthetic that helps us to approach structurally elaborate early works. Readers in such fields as Classical literature, Medieval Studies, Renaissance Studies, comparative literature, literary theory, art history, and intellectual history will welcome this wide-ranging and illuminating book.

No detailed description available for "Untold Futures".

This microhistory of the Salvagos—an Istanbul family of Venetian interpreters and spies travelling the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mediterranean—is a remarkable feat of the historian’s craft of storytelling. With his father having been killed by secret order of Venice and his nephew to be publicly assassinated by Ottoman authorities, Genesino Salvago and his brothers started writing self-narratives. When crossing the borders of words and worlds, the Salvagos’ self-narratives helped navigate at times beneficial, other times unsettling entanglements of empire, family, and translation. The discovery of an autobiographical text with rich information on Southeastern Europe, edited here for the first time, is the starting point of this extraordinary microbiography of a family’s intense struggle for manoeuvring a changing world disrupted by competition, betrayal, and colonialism. This volume recovers the Venetian life stories of Ottoman subjects and the crucial role of translation in negotiating a shared but fragile Mediterranean. Stefan Hanß examines an interpreter’s translational practices of the self and recovers the wider Mediterranean significance of the early modern Balkan contact zone. Offering a novel conversation between translation studies, Mediterranean studies, and the history of life-writing, this volume argues that dragomans’ practices of translation, border-crossing, and mobility were key to their experiences and performances of the self. This book is an indispensable reading for the history of the early modern Mediterranean, self-narratives, Venice, the Ottoman Empire, and Southeastern Europe, as well as the history of translation. Hanß presents a truly fascinating narrative, a microhistory full of insights and rich perspectives.