Abstract
The early modern interaction of the three Abrahamic religions, termed by the Qur’ān the ‘Peoples of the Book’, varies considerably in different geographical contexts. Islamic law provided freedom for Jews and Christians to practice their religion within the Ottoman Empire, a freedom that — although by no means unqualified — was rarely enjoyed by Jews and Muslims in Christian lands. A vast multiethnic and multireligious entity, the Ottoman polity conspicuously welcomed those Sephardic Jews dispossessed in Spain in 1492 and later, and was largely unconcerned with differentiating those ‘Franks’ that sought trading privileges in Istanbul (compare Imber’s comments on p. 61).1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Avigdor Levy, The Jews of the Ottoman Empire ( Princeton NJ.: Darwin Press, 1992 ) pp. 1–12.
Gordon Weiner, ‘Jewish Anti-Christianism from the Crusades to the Reformation’, pp. 281—94, in Marc Anthony Meyer ed., The Culture of Christendom: Essays in Medieval History in Commemoration of Denis L. T. Bethell ( London and Rio Grande: The Hambledon Press, 1993 ) pp. 288–9.
Peter of Cluny–‘the Venerable’–wrote a text, Against the Inveterate Stubbornness of the Jews. This text is discussed alongside an excellent mapping of this corpus in John Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) pp. 135–69.
For a discussion of the nature of travel to the east and ‘eastern’ travel texts in this period, see Gerald MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
For instance in Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 )
Nabil Matar Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999)
Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater in the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)
Richmond Barbour, Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East, 1576–1626 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Jonathan Burton, Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–1624 ( Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005 )
and Matthew Dimmock, New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England ( Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005 ).
This argument is made persuasively in R. I. Moore’s The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Medieval Europe, 950–1250 ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987 )
and is reinforced in Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700 (London: Allen Lane, 2003).
The document that emphatically makes the connection between merchants and Jews (and Marlowe) is the ‘Dutch Church Libel’ of 1593. It is reproduced in Arthur Freeman, ‘Marlowe, Kyd and the Dutch Church Libel’, in English Literary Renaissance, 3 (1973) pp. 44–52. See also Laura Hunt Yungblut, Strangers Setttled Here Amongst Us: Policies, Perceptions and the Presence of Aliens in Elizabethan England (London and New York: Routledge, 1996).
Alexander Ross, ‘A needful Caveat, or Admonition, for them who desire to know what use may be made of, or if there be danger in reading the Alcoran’ [unpaginated: p. 6], preface to the anonymous translation, The Alcoran of Mahomet, translated out of Arabick into French, by the Sieur Du Ryer, Lord of Malezair, and resident for the French king, at Alexandria. And newly Englished, for the satisfaction of all that desire to look into the Turkish vanities (London: 1649 ).
Rudolph Wittkower, ‘Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters’, in The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 5 (1942) pp. 159–97, p.159.
All quotations from ‘The Wakefield Pageant of Herod the Great’ comes from A. C. Cawley, ed., Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays (London: Everyman [J. M. Dent], 1993 edition) pp. 105–24.
Osborn Waterhouse, The Non-Cycle Mystery Plays, together with the Croxton Play of the Sacrament and the Pride of Life ( London: Early English Text Society, 1909 ).
An extended discussion of the components and history of this ‘Jew Libel’ can be found in James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996) pp. 43–112.
Relatively few works focus upon visual representations by Christians of the Prophet Muhammad. Two useful examples are Michael Camille’s The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 ) and Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons & Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art ( Princeton NJ.: Princeton University Press, 2003 ).
Marie-Thérèse D’Alverny, ‘Deux traductions latines du Coran au moyen âge’, in Archives d’histoire doctrinale et litéraire du moyen âge, 16 (1947–8) pp. 69–131. For a detailed discussion of Peter of Cluny and his influence, see James Kritzeck, Peter the Venerable and Islam ( Princeton NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1964 ).
Walter B. Cahn, ‘The “Portrait” of Muhammad in the Toledan Collection’, pp. 51–60 in Elizabeth Sears and Thelma K. Thomas, eds, Reading Medieval Images: The Art Historian and the Object (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2002 ) p. 57.
The fish as Christian symbol for Christ is discussed in the relevant entries in G. Schiller, The Iconography of Christian Art, vol. 1 (London: Lund Humphries,1966)
and in F. Klingender, Animals in Art and Thought to the End of the Middle Ages ( London: Routledge, 1972 ).
Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage (London, 1613).
Ranulph Higden, Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden Monachi Cestrensis, ed. Joseph Rawson Lumby, Vol. VI (Kraus Reprint (1964) of Her Majesty’s Stationary Office edition: 1876) p. 15.
The figure of Sergius is considered in Tolan, p. 150: see also the relevant chapters in Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image, revised edition ( London: One World, 1993 ).
Thomas Beard, The Theatre of God’s Judgements (London, 1597), p. 103.
Desiderius Erasmus, ‘De Bello Turcico: A Most Useful Discussion Concerning Proposals for War Against the Turks’, pp. 201–66, in Dominic Baker-Smith, ed., Collected Works of Erasmus, vol 64 ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005 ) p. 258.
In this context the continuing popularity of Henrik van Haesten’s Apocalypsis, or the Revelation of Certain Notorious Advancers of Heresie (first published in English in 1658) is important. It exists in various forms but was widely disseminated as an appendage to Alexander Ross’ Pancebeia (London, 1658).
Nabil Matar, ‘The Anglo-Muslim Disputation in the Early Modern Period’, in Matthew Birchwood and Matthew Dimmock, eds, Cultural Encounters Between East and West, 1453–1699 (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005) pp. 29–42, p. 37.
Harry Clark, ‘The Publication of the Koran in Latin: A Reformation Dilemma’, Sixteenth Century Journal, XV, No. 1 (1984) pp. 3–12. I have managed to identify 140 copies still extant of these three editions.
Andre du Ryer, L’Alcoran de Mahomet. Translaté d’Arabe en François, par le sieur Du Ryer, sieur de la Garde Malezair (À Paris: Chez Antoine de Sommaville, 1647). See also Matthew Birchwood, ‘Dramatic Representations of Islam in England 1640–1685’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London, 2002 ).
Mark Thornton Burnett, Constructing ‘Monsters’ in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002) p. 133, pp. 8–32.
Luther an den Rat zu Basel, 27 October 1542 as quoted in Harry Clark, ‘The Publication of the Koran in Latin: A Reformation Dilemma’, pp. 3–12 in Sixteenth Century Journal, XV, No. 1 (1984) pp. 10–11.
Quoted and translated from the Libro de la Cosmogrophia et Geographia de Affrica [MS V. E. 953 Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Rome] in Natalie Zemon Davis, Tickster Travels: In Search of Leo Africanus, a Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds (London: Faber, 2007) p. 160.
Lycosthenes (pseudonym of Conrad Wolffhart), Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon (Basle, 1557) quoted in Wittkower, p. 185.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2008 Matthew Dimmock
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Dimmock, M. (2008). ‘A Human Head to the Neck of a Horse’: Hybridity, Monstrosity and Early Christian Conceptions of Muhammad and Islam. In: Dimmock, M., Hadfield, A. (eds) The Religions of the Book. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230582576_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230582576_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-28613-3
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-58257-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)