We live in an age of aspirational globalism. Many of us tout the goals and the benefits of a more fluid and open world, yet many others can react unsympathetically and even aggressively to the repercussions of the global flow of things, ideas and populations, which move east and west, north and south, in our ineluctably global era. The early modern period can justly be thought of as the first age of globalism—maritime and commercial breakthroughs allowed people and products and myriad cultural forms to move across continents and oceans as never before—and it shared some of the ambivalence and paradoxes of our postmodern globalism. It looked ambitiously beyond its borders, yet it tended to retrench, often vehemently, into long-nurtured parochial sensibilities.
The book under review reflects some of the aspirational thinking of the globalists, both in its historiographic call to arms—it hopes to see more scholarship that crosses cultural and continental borders—and in the approach of several of its essays, which, even while touting the globalism they aspire to identify in their subjects, do not always locate, let alone analyse and theorize, the form of early modern globalism they are hoping to underscore. Contadini and Norton’s collection of essays has its origins in a 2006 conference sponsored by London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and the Warburg. It focuses on what may count as the most important sphere of global exchange of the early modern period, which linked “Europe” (more on those scare quotes in a moment) and the Ottoman empire, the latter neighbouring Christian Europe to the east and south and, in fact, inhabiting large portions of the European continent throughout the early modern period. The volume spotlights what it calls the “transculturation and exchange” between the “Renaissance” and the “Ottoman World” (or, varyingly, the “impingement”, “interconnectivity”, “acculturation”, “intercultural [exchange]”, “cultural mimesis” and so on) that took place between “Christian Western Europe and the Islamic Eastern Mediterranean”. The essays are uniformly interesting, well researched, smartly presented; and, taken collectively, they offer an impressively cross-disciplinary take on the topic. They often show moments of cross-cultural flow. Yet more often than not, they traffic in representations of, borrowings from, commerce with, and attitudes toward the Ottomans, mostly from the point of view of Europe, even more so from the perspective of Italian authors and artists, and, above all, from the perch of Venice. As such, the volume seeks to develop the sort of work pioneered by Lisa Jardine, Deborah Howard (a contributor to this collection whose essay draws on her earlier publications), Rosamond Mack, Jerry Brotton, Nancy Bisaha, Eric Dursteler, Margaret Meserve and Natalie Rothman—all of whom have published on the topic over the past two decades, mostly focusing on Italy and Istanbul.
This disjuncture between aspiration and execution is less a matter of the quality of the work in this collection—always very high—than the volume’s ambitions, which are laudatory and exemplary, if not quite met. Could they ever be? Claire Norton, in her expansive introductory chapter, speaks of an “iron curtain” in the historiography, which has hitherto prevented us from seeing the cross-cultural currents flowing between Europe and the Ottoman world. Yet scholarship of the past few decades has amply demonstrated “interconnections” between of these two spheres. The work of material historians, in particular—reviewed in an excellent, broad-ranging essay by Anna Contadini and developed further in Alison Ohta’s fine study of book bindings and in Suraiya Faroqhi’s equally interesting chapter on textiles—illustrates such cultural exchanges in concrete and objective ways. We have less sense of the meaning of exchanged artefacts, however, and of borrowed motifs framed in their various cultural milieu—Italian and Ottoman in the cases surveyed in this volume, yet one would also wish to know what Ottoman objects meant, for example, in Castile and Aragon, in Flanders and Holland, important “Renaissance” regions scarcely touched upon in this volume. One might also wish to know how Ottoman culture itself responded to those things that flowed in an easterly direction (or southerly, namely from Spain). An essay on music by Owen Wright does a fine job of exploring East-West affiliations in this field, yet it affords a mostly Italian point of view and describes, by and large, European curiosity in Ottoman music rather than the reverse (in both cases, Wright suggests, interests were meagre but this conclusion might have been interrogated and integrated into the broader scope of the volume: why the exchanges of material arts and not of musical instruments?). Maps are handled in two excellent essays by Palmira Brummett and Sonja Brentjes, yet chiefly from a Venetian perspective—Ottoman cartography is not a central concern. There are also expertly researched essays on humanist engagements with the Ottoman “Turk” by Zweder von Wertels, Asaph Ben-Tov and Noel Malcolm. These range across European national borders—Italian, German and French, respectively—yet their point of orientation is consistently that of Europe gazing at the Eastern Other rather than that of a fully integrative, dialectical and global approach.
A fully integrated approach—the cri de coeur that opens the volume—may well require more time, more archival work, more linguistic expertise and more theoretical analysis. Or, perhaps, simply more volumes such as the one under review, which, in its admirable ambitions and commendable aspirations, will no doubt encourage more scholars to carry this inquiry further.
