Matthew Dimmock's New Turkes is a detailed study of the image of Islam and “Turks” in sixteenth-century England. It unearths a wealth of primary sources that are analyzed within a carefully presented historical context. Dimmock avoids the pitfalls of cultural historians who generalize from theory to text: instead, he approaches the texts through the lens of the political, religious, and military transformations of the sixteenth century. The book is lucidly written and is happily unencumbered with the jargon that now infests studies on Islam and Europe in the early modern period. It belongs solidly to the recent scholarship that explores the role of Islamic civilization in the making of early modern Britain. As Dimmock observes, Islam and the Turk took “a central position in so many aspects of English life in the sixteenth century” (16).

Thematically, the book is in two parts: the first examines the presence of Islam in theological and polemical sources; the second focuses on Anglo-Ottoman relations in the Elizabethan period and their impact on London drama, from The Battle of Alcazar to some concluding observations on Othello. The first part, “The ‘Turke’ and ‘Turkishness’ in England, 1529–1571,” ranges over a vast terrain, but Dimmock elucidates texts and personalities with clarity, always keeping the reader aware of the years in which his analysis takes place. He discusses Erasmus and Martin Luther, John Rastell, Thomas More and John Foxe, and their evolving and differing views of Muslims, with Luther slowly moving from his initial neutrality toward the Ottomans to their condemnation as the “flesh” of the Antichrist (29). Dimmock emphasizes that all the English sources about the Turks were translations from the Continent (chiefly Latin and French), and although they provided ample information about Ottoman history, society, and “Alcoran,” English writers often used “Turke” to “illustrate and advocate their own positions within the Reformation debate” (43). Much as they feared the Ottomans and called for Christian holy war against them, English authors and their readers also treated them from within a predominantly theological perspective, so much so that the “Turke” was often a “marker of infidelity against which the English schismatics … were measured” (53). The Turk of the Ottoman Empire was also the new “Turke”—the Lutheran or the Papist or the false Christian—inside England and the rest of Christendom. Dimmock interestingly shows how the religio-political anxiety in England led numerous writers to declare the pope a more dangerous enemy than the Turk.

The second part of the book opens with a survey of Anglo-Ottoman commercial relations. How extensive these relations were is not clear, as Dimmock admits: despite diplomatic representation in the Ottoman Levant, especially under Elizabeth (although “alliance” is too strong a term to describe Murad III's capitulations to the queen [52]), “It is remarkable that so few contemporary references exist to … the increasingly lucrative English trade with the Porte” (89). This observation is important: while there was tremendous interest in London that the English factor William Harbourne should co-opt Murad III militarily against Spain, the French and the Venetian opposition to English commercial and diplomatic competition was fierce. Notwithstanding the correspondence of the queen with the sultan, the Ottomans did not extend the naval assistance that the queen wanted—a goal that was by far more important to her than the dealings of some venturesome traders. Perhaps the limitedness of exchange explains the continued appearances in print of anti-Muslim tracts. Although there were publications about the “martial and secular figure of the honourable and valiant ‘Turke,’” these depictions confined the Turk to a romance tradition that “divested” him of “any religious signification” (93). The Turk of Barnaby Rich, as Dimmock shows, belongs more to Giovanni Boccaccio and Cinthio (Giambattista Giraldi) than to the Turks whom Harbourne was imploring or by whom travelers were intimidated. Similarly, and although the “gentle” Turk of Robert Wilson's Three Ladies of London does not exude the anti-Ottomanism of other Elizabethan texts, neither does he have a name, and he appears simply as part of the background to the “Turkey” where the Catholic and the Jew are the chief dramatic protagonists. Dimmock is eager to show a complex and nuanced representation of the “Turk” on the English stage: but writers and dramatists did not discard their anti-Ottoman sentiments, and although they may not have demonized the Turk, neither did they depict real Turks with a distinct history, identity, and religious culture. It is surprising that Dimmock views Nicolas de Nicolay's Nauigations and Meredith Hanmer's The Baptizing of a Turke as “ambivalent” in their attitude to Islam: the former provides illustrations of weird Turks—the “Calender” with his pierced penis, and the “Dervish” slashing himself with a knife—while the latter simply defeats Islam by converting the Muslim out of his faith to a triumphant Protestantism (triumphant over Catholicism, too).

In the discussion of the plays, Dimmock presses this theme of an “ambivalent” portrayal of Turks—that while there were negative stereotypes, there were challenges and changes. Unfortunately, one of the historical factors that Dimmock ignores was the difference between Turks and Moors—two groups that he conflates. While he consults evidence about Anglo-Ottoman cooperation, he ignores the larger and more extensive documentation about Anglo-Magharibi relations—relations with the Moors of North Africa. After all, trade, diplomacy, and military collusion were by far more extensive between Elizabeth and Ahmad al-Mansur than between her and Murad III and Mehmed III. The vast compendium of material on England and Morocco compiled by Henry de Castries is strangely missing from the bibliography. This and other material would demonstrate that George Peele's The Battle of Alcazar, for instance, is better read in the context of the intense Anglo-Moroccan diplomacy of the late 1580s, when the play was written, than in light of “the Spanish-Ottoman peace settlement of 1580” (18, and the extensive discussion in chap. 3). Similarly confusing is the discussion of Othello, who is conflated with the “Turk” despite being a warrior against the Turks (92–93). It is not clear how the romance tradition about the Turk helps explain the “celebrated ambivalence” (93) of the Moor of Venice whose tragedy takes place in the context of the war against the Turk and the danger of “turning Turk.”

Dimmock argues that Elizabethan drama did not present a necessarily unwavering stereotype of the “cruel and bloody Turk.” But as the first part of the book had so ably shown, the Turk was more “iconographically powerful” (86) than he was culturally or historically. While there was certainly creative engagement with the Turk on the part of London playwrights, none of them is known to have had familiarity with Turks in the manner, for instance, of Miguel de Cervantes. In the case of the latter, having spent five years in Algiers, he was able to depict Turks (and Moors) with, if not sympathy, at least some verisimilitude: the Turks are always Turks in that they are Muslim if nothing else. English dramatists did not have a Cervantes to mediate the Muslims to them, thereby determining the later models of Turks and Moors; what the London playwrights had were the extensive polemics and theological vituperations on which they happily drew. Dimmock believes, however, that the commercial and diplomatic intensity of English relations with the Ottoman world was decisive in leaving its mark on English drama and in producing the aforementioned “ambivalence.” Such a belief is not substantiated, since numerous scholars have shown that the attitude to Turks and Moors expressed by those in the corridors of diplomatic and commercial power differed widely from those on the London stage. (See, e.g., Greg Bak, “Different Differences: Locating Moorishness in Early Modern English Culture,” Dalhousie Review 76 [1996]: 197–216.) Traders not only lived among Muslims but also were desperate to market their wares—which is why they adopted a relatively nonconfrontational attitude, unlike the dramatists who sought popularity and appeal before a London audience that was a recipient of a long and virulent anti-Islamic legacy. One only has to look at today's discourses for this difference between official and popular responses: politicians and CEOs, who seek business relations and market access in the Islamic world, repeat platitudes of openness to Muslims, while film, newspaper cartoons, and other forms of media, along with pronouncements from the pulpits, which are aimed at the public at large, provide, with a few stellar exceptions, a devastatingly bigoted and uninformed representation.

It is difficult to find such stellar exceptions in the Elizabethan period. That is why, even when an author wanted to present Turks as “ambivalent,” he could do nothing other than de-Islamicize them. Dimmock draws attention to the valiant representation of the Turks in Peele's Alcazar: but then, at no point is the Ottoman sultan presented as a Muslim; rather, he swears by pagan deities, is “adored” (1.1.63) by Moorish women, and is dissociated from anything remotely Islamic. To praise the “Turk” only after he is de-Islamicized cannot be adduced as an argument in support of Peele's alleged challenge to the stereotype. Not surprising, Peele did not even produce “Turkish” or “Moorish” names (Argerd Zareo, Calipolis, Abdil Rayes, etc.; contrast with Cervantes). The Turks who were being invoked to help the queen could not be presented to the London theatergoers as “Mahometan”—with their objectionable theology and nomenclature. This strategy of de-Islamicization confirms traditional Euro-Christian polarization where Muslims cannot be accepted if they exhibit noble, “Christian” qualities. “Tamburlaine,” who destroys the Qur’an, before what must have been a roaring London audience, cannot really be “ambivalent,” can he? Notwithstanding these problems in historicizing interpretation, New Turkes rests on solid scholarship (the bibliography is invaluable) and opens the way for future investigation into a period in English history that Dimmock shows was widely infused with images, translations, chronicles, plays, polemics, and theological treatises about Islam and the Turks—both the “Turks” of the Ottoman Empire and the “new Turkes” of England.