Introduction: Beyond the Olive Trees: Remapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings

Abstract

T he broad yet poignant reflection on the Mediterranean as a cultural signifier in this epigraph points to the route taken by the essays in this book. The word “remapping” in the title refers to discursive representations of the Mediterranean in early modern English literary and nonliterary writings. The essays in Remapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings 2 address the Mediterranean from a variety of perspectives, reflecting recent scholarly interests in, and definitions of, Anglo-Mediterranean contacts. Some of those definitions in these essays take the Mediterranean to mean a geographical reality and an area of Anglo-Ottoman trade and diplomacy. For others, it implies early modern imperialism. In this volume, the Mediterranean is subsumed under a more specific category of the eastern Mediterranean as a region onto which Renaissance England projected discursively, if not in reality, its colonizing fantasies. The essays in Remapping the Mediterranean World examine how early modern English imagination conceptualized the intermingling categories of sameness and difference, of otherness and familiarity, which were produced through complex and often ambiguous contacts between Renaissance England and the Mediterranean, especially the eastern Mediterranean. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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