During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Ottoman empire posed a clear and present danger to Christian rule in Europe. While English commerce with the Mediterranean world expanded, Ottoman forces invaded Greece, Hungary, and Austria. At the same time, "Turkish" pirates and renegades from North Africa roamed the Atlantic and raided the coast of England. The threat was ideological as well: English sailors captured by Barbary pirates sometimes renounced their faith and converted to Islam.

Here, three important early modern "Turk" plays--Robert Greene's Selimus, Emperor of the...

These narratives recount the harrowing experiences of Englishmen abducted by the Barbary pirates of North Africa. After being sold into slavery, the narrators succeeded in returning to their homeland where their stories were printed. Never before available in a modern, annotated edition, these tales describe combat at sea, extraordinary escapes, and religious conversion, but they also illustrate the power, prosperity, and piety of Muslims in the early modern Mediterranean. Each narrative is preceded by a brief introduction, and Nabil Matar's genera introduction provides important new...

These narratives recount the harrowing experiences of Englishmen abducted by the Barbary pirates of North Africa. After being sold into slavery, the narrators succeeded in returning to their homeland where their stories were printed. Never before available in a modern, annotated edition, these tales describe combat at sea, extraordinary escapes, and religious conversion, but they also illustrate the power, prosperity, and piety of Muslims in the early modern Mediterranean. Each narrative is preceded by a brief introduction, and Nabil Matar's genera introduction provides important new...

Turning Turk looks at contact between the English and other cultures inthe early modern Mediterranean, and analyzes the representation of thatexperience on the London stage. Vitkus's book demonstrates that theEnglish encounter with exotic alterity, and the theatrical representationsinspired by that encounter, helped to form the emergent identity of an English nation that was eagerly fantasizing about having an empire but was still in the preliminary phase of its colonizing drive. Vitkus' research shows how plays about the multi-cultural Mediterranean participated in this process of identity...