Cultural Encounters Between East and West, 1453-1699
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The Religions of the Book
This is the first study to explore the relationship between Christianity, Judaism and Islam in the Early Modern period. Contributors debate the complicated terms in which these 'Religions of the Book' interacted. The collection illuminates this area of European culture from the late Middle Ages to the end of the Seventeenth century.
Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture
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.
The East-West Discourse
This volume examines East-West rhetoric in several different historical contexts, seeking to problematise its implicit assumptions and analyse its consequences.
Early Quakers and Islam
Early Quaker encounters with Muslims in the seventeenth century helped generate some of the most distinctive and, at times, sympathetic Christian responses to Islam found in the early modern era. Texts such as George Fox's To the Great Turk (1680), in which he engaged in extensive, constructive exegesis of the Qur'an, demonstrate a conception of Islam and Muslims that disrupts many prevailing assumptions of the period. Some responses are all the more striking as they came about as a reaction to the enslavement of a number of Quakers by Muslims in North Africa, where, paradoxically, they often experienced religious freedom denied them at home. This study seeks to understand how and why this heterodox Christian sect created such unusual interpretations of Islam by analyzing the experience of these slaves and scrutinizing the distinctive, oppositional culture of the movement to which they belonged. The work has implications that go beyond the specific subject of study and raises questions about the role that such things as apocalypticism and sectarianism can play in interreligious encounters, and the analytical limitations of Orientalism in characterizing Christian representations of Islam in the early modern period.