Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture

Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture PDF Author: Matthew Dimmock
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781107327061
Category : Christianity and other religions
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Get Book

Book Description
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"

Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture

Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture PDF Author: Matthew Dimmock
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781107336827
Category : Christianity and other religions
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Get Book

Book Description
This book explores how the figure of the Prophet Muhammad was misrepresented in English and wider Christian culture between 1480 and 1735.

Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture

Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture PDF Author: Matthew Dimmock
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107032911
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Get Book

Book Description
This book explores how the figure of the Prophet Muhammad was misrepresented in English and wider Christian culture between 1480 and 1735. By tracing the ways in which 'Mahomet' was written and rewritten, contested and celebrated, this study explores notions of identity and religion, and the resonances of this history today.

Lying in Early Modern English Culture

Lying in Early Modern English Culture PDF Author: Andrew Hadfield
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192506595
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 408

Get Book

Book Description
Lying in Early Modern English Culture is a major study of ideas of truth and falsehood in early modern England from the advent of the Reformation to the aftermath of the failed Gunpowder Plot. The period is characterised by panic and chaos when few had any idea how religious, cultural, and social life would develop after the traumatic division of Christendom. While many saw the need for a secular power to define the truth others declared that their allegiances belonged elsewhere. Accordingly there was a constant battle between competing authorities for the right to declare what was the truth and so label opponents as liars. Issues of truth and lying were, therefore, a constant feature of everyday life and determined ideas of individual identity, politics, speech, sex, marriage, and social behaviour, as well as philosophy and religion. This book is a cultural history of truth and lying from the 1530s to the 1610s, showing how lying needs to be understood in action as well as in theory. Unlike most histories of lying, it concentrates on a series of particular events reading them in terms of academic theories and more popular notions of lying. The book covers a wide range of material such as the trials of Ann Boleyn and Thomas More, the divorce of Frances Howard, and the murder of Anthony James by Annis and George Dell; works of literature such as Othello, The Faerie Queene, A Mirror for Magistrates, and The Unfortunate Traveller; works of popular culture such as the herring pamphlet of 1597; and major writings by Castiglione, Montaigne, Erasmus, Luther, and Tyndale.

Turks, Repertories, and the Early Modern English Stage

Turks, Repertories, and the Early Modern English Stage PDF Author: Mark Hutchings
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137462639
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Get Book

Book Description
This book considers the relationship between the vogue for putting the Ottoman Empire on the English stage and the repertory system that underpinned London playmaking. The sheer visibility of 'the Turk' in plays staged between 1567 and 1642 has tended to be interpreted as registering English attitudes to Islam, as articulating popular perceptions of Anglo-Ottoman relations, and as part of a broader interest in the wider world brought home by travellers, writers, adventurers, merchants, and diplomats. Such reports furnished playwrights with raw material which, fashioned into drama, established ‘the Turk’ as a fixture in the playhouse. But it was the demand for plays to replenish company repertories to attract London audiences that underpinned playmaking in this period. Thus this remarkable fascination for the Ottoman Empire is best understood as a product of theatre economics and the repertory system, rather than taken directly as a measure of cultural and historical engagement.

Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England

Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England PDF Author: Abigail Shinn
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319965778
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Get Book

Book Description
This book is a study of English conversion narratives between 1580 and 1660. Focusing on the formal, stylistic properties of these texts, it argues that there is a direct correspondence between the spiritual and rhetorical turn. Furthermore, by focusing on a comparatively early period in the history of the conversion narrative the book charts for the first time writers’ experimentation and engagement with rhetorical theory before the genre’s relative stabilization in the 1650s. A cross confessional study analyzing work by both Protestant and Catholic writers, this book explores conversion’s relationship with reading; the links between conversion, eloquence, translation and trope; the conflation of spiritual movement with literal travel; and the use of the body as a site for spiritual knowledge and proof.

Islam and The English Enlightenment

Islam and The English Enlightenment PDF Author: Zulfiqar Ali Shah
Publisher: Claritas Books
ISBN: 1800119844
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book

Book Description
“Never before to my knowledge has the cross-fertilisation of Western and Islamic ideas been so encyclopedically documented as it is here. In reading Islam and the English Enlightenment, you will never see the relationship between Islam and the West in the same way again.” ROBERT F. SHEDI NGER Professor of Religion, Luther College “Dr. Zulfiqar Ali Shah’s Islam and the English Enlightenment is one of the most profoundly enlightening books I have read in years. Dr. Shah compellingly demonstrates that the thinkers of English Enlightenment were undeniably indebted to Islamic sciences and thought, and that the foundational principles of rationalist thought, scientific inquiry and religious toleration were deeply anchored in the Islamic tradition.” KHALED ABOU EL FADL Omar & Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law “This is a book that anyone interested in stepping outside a Eurocentric view of the rise of the West and of the modern age must read.” MICHAEL A. GILLESPIE Professor of Political Science & Philosophy, Duke University “Dr. Shah convincingly demonstrates the central role that Islam played in shaping the values and ideas of the Enlightenment reformers such as John Locke and Isaac Newton who had helped to produce the modern world.” GERALD MACLEAN Emeritus Professor, University of Exeter

Early Modern Constructions of Europe

Early Modern Constructions of Europe PDF Author: Florian Kläger
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317394925
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Get Book

Book Description
Between the medieval conception of Christendom and the political visions of modernity, ideas of Europe underwent a transformative and catalytic period that saw a cultural process of renewed self-definition or self-Europeanization. The contributors to this volume address this process, analyzing how Europe was imagined between 1450 and 1750. By whom, in which contexts, and for what purposes was Europe made into a subject of discourse? Which forms did early modern ‘Europes’ take, and what functions did they serve? Essays examine the role of factors such as religion, history, space and geography, ethnicity and alterity, patronage and dynasty, migration and education, language, translation, and narration for the ways in which Europe turned into an ‘imagined community.’ The thematic range of the volume comprises early modern texts in Arabic, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, including plays, poems, and narrative fiction, as well as cartography, historiography, iconography, travelogues, periodicals, and political polemics. Literary negotiations in particular foreground the creative potential, versatility, and agency that inhere in the process of Europeanization, as well as a specifically early modern attitude towards the past and tradition emblematized in the poetics of the period. There is a clear continuity between the collection’s approach to European identities and the focus of cultural and postcolonial studies on the constructed nature of collective identities at large: the chapters build on the insights produced by these fields over the past decades and apply them, from various angles, to a subject that has so far largely eluded critical attention. This volume examines what existing and well-established work on identity and alterity, hybridity and margins has to contribute to an understanding of the largely un-examined and under-theorized ‘pre-formative’ period of European identity.

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern English Literature and Religion

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern English Literature and Religion PDF Author: Andrew Hiscock
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191653438
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 720

Get Book

Book Description
This pioneering Handbook offers a comprehensive consideration of the dynamic relationship between English literature and religion in the early modern period. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the most turbulent times in the history of the British church and, perhaps as a result, produced some of the greatest devotional poetry, sermons, polemics, and epics of literature in English. The early-modern interaction of rhetoric and faith is addressed in thirty-nine chapters of original research, divided into five sections. The first analyses the changes within the church from the Reformation to the establishment of the Church of England, the phenomenon of puritanism and the rise of non-conformity. The second section discusses ten genres in which faith was explored, including poetry, prophecy, drama, sermons, satire, and autobiographical writings. The middle section focuses on selected individual authors, among them Thomas More, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, Lucy Hutchinson, and John Milton. Since authors never write in isolation, the fourth section examines a range of communities in which writers interpreted their faith: lay and religious households, sectarian groups including the Quakers, clusters of religious exiles, Jewish and Islamic communities, and those who settled in the new world. Finally, the fifth section considers some key topics and debates in early modern religious literature, ranging from ideas of authority and the relationship of body and soul, to death, judgment, and eternity. The Handbook is framed by a succinct introduction, a chronology of religious and literary landmarks, a guide for new researchers in this field, and a full bibliography of primary and secondary texts relating to early modern English literature and religion.

British Encounters with Ottoman Minorities in the Early Seventeenth Century

British Encounters with Ottoman Minorities in the Early Seventeenth Century PDF Author: Eva Johanna Holmberg
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030972283
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237

Get Book

Book Description
British travellers regarded all inhabitants of the seventeenth-century Ottoman empire as ‘slaves of the sultan’, yet they also made fine distinctions between them. This book provides the first historical account of how British travellers understood the non-Muslim peoples they encountered in Ottoman lands, and of how they perceived and described them in the mediating shadow of the Turks. In doing so it changes our perceptions of the European encounter with the Ottomans by exploring the complex identities of the subjects of the Ottoman empire in the English imagination, de-centering the image of the ‘Terrible Turk’ and Islam.