Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Figures
- Introduction: Seduction, Resistance, and Redemption: “Turning Turk” and the Embodiment of Christian Faith
- 1 Dangerous Fellowship: Universal Faith and its Bodily Limits in The Comedy of Errors and Othello
- 2 Recycled Models: Catholic Martyrdom and Embodied Resistance to Conversion in The Virgin Martyr and Other Red Bull Plays
- 3 Engendering Faith: Sexual Defilement and Spiritual Redemption in The Renegado
- 4 “Reforming” the Knights of Malta: Male Chastity and Temperance in Five Early Modern Plays
- 5 Epilogue: Turning Miscegenation into Tragicomedy (Or Not): Robert Greene's Orlando Furioso
- Notes
- Index
Introduction: Seduction, Resistance, and Redemption: “Turning Turk” and the Embodiment of Christian Faith
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Figures
- Introduction: Seduction, Resistance, and Redemption: “Turning Turk” and the Embodiment of Christian Faith
- 1 Dangerous Fellowship: Universal Faith and its Bodily Limits in The Comedy of Errors and Othello
- 2 Recycled Models: Catholic Martyrdom and Embodied Resistance to Conversion in The Virgin Martyr and Other Red Bull Plays
- 3 Engendering Faith: Sexual Defilement and Spiritual Redemption in The Renegado
- 4 “Reforming” the Knights of Malta: Male Chastity and Temperance in Five Early Modern Plays
- 5 Epilogue: Turning Miscegenation into Tragicomedy (Or Not): Robert Greene's Orlando Furioso
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Nay, if the flesh take hold of him, he's past redemption.
He's half a Turk already; it's as good as done.
Robert Daborne, A Christian Turned Turke (c.1610)Could anything be worse than being captured by Turks, stripped, beaten, and mercilessly killed? In the minds of early modern English people, there was one thing even worse than dying at the hands of Turks: conversion. Whereas a death by martyrdom offered the chance for salvation, converting to Islam set one on a path of irredeemable damnation. In addition, “turning Turk” implied not just a religious conversion, but also the complete undoing of all things constitutive of an English Christian identity.
It was a threat that was oddly familiar to those living in and around London in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Ottoman empire may have been halfway across the globe, but its influence was increasingly present in the daily lives of English Christians – in the foods they ate, the clothes they wore, the sermons they heard at church, the stories they read in the news, and the fears and fantasies that filled their imaginations. In particular, English awareness of the Ottoman empire heightened as the result of England's growing participation in Mediterranean trade. Commerce brought eastern imports into English spaces and drew increasing numbers of English citizens to the waters and ports of the eastern Mediterranean. But commerce depended upon certain risks, which included not only the dangers of seafaring and the economic risks of piracy and foreign investment, but also the personal risk of losing English bodies and souls to Islamic conversion.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010