<i>Representing Imperial Rivalry in the Early Modern Mediterranean</i>. Edited by Barbara Fuchs and Emily Weissbourd. Toronto: University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2015. Pp. vi+282.

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewRepresenting Imperial Rivalry in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Edited by Barbara Fuchs and Emily Weissbourd. Toronto: University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2015. Pp. vi+282.Dale ShugerDale ShugerTulane University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe twelve essays in this book emerged from a yearlong program held at UCLA’s Clark Library in 2011 and 2012. As editors Barbara Fuchs and Emily Weissbourd explain in the brief introduction, the book grew from an earlier Clark library publication, Braudel Revisited: The Mediterranean World, 1600–1800 (2010). The revisitation does not call into question the validity of the “Mediterranean turn” but instead proposes to fill in some of the details left out by Braudel, who chose to focus on the “macro-historical, even geological perspective” (3). The Clark residency offers an ideal opportunity to integrate microhistories into macrogeographies, since participants with diverse specializations can share and supplement knowledge. The editors of this volume aim to provide “a model for studying the interconnection of empires and would-be empires, instead of considering them side-by-side” (4), and they do this insofar as most of the chapters themselves discuss a particular point of imperial overlap. However, the vast scope of the topic means that by and large the volume is the sum of its parts, and the parts are valuable individual chapters.The book is divided in two parts: “Envisioning Empire in the Old World” and “Imagining the Mediterranean in Early Modern England.” The second title is a surprise, initially because the use of “Old World” in the first leads one to expect a comparison with the “New” and, more obviously, because it is 800 miles from London to the nearest Mediterranean port. We would seem to have turned from the Mediterranean turn and completed a 360-degree pirouette back to the category of “Europe.” The discussion of Ottoman empire augments rather than mitigates this effect, as (with one exception) it centers on the representation of Ottoman expansion in European sources and societies. The second half is also traditional in its use of sources, privileging Shakespeare, Middleton, Heywood, and Webster, which shows there are interesting and new things to be said about the English canon, regardless of the theoretical framework employed.The first chapter of the volume, Ania Loomba’s “Mediterranean Borderlands and the Global Early Modern,” is representative of this conjunction of old and new paradigms. Loomba returns to the Shakespearean “global” text par excellence, The Tempest, first summarizing the various ways it has been read as imperial allegory and finally proposing that the multiplicity of all these plausible readings “hints at the shape of early globalization … not because its geographies evoke each of these contexts, [but] because it hints at the connections between them” (28). Subsequent chapters focus on the interconnectedness of empires, not in the material realm but in the discursive one. “Mapping Trans-Imperial Ottoman Space: Alterity and Attraction” by Palmira Brummett and “Europe’s Turkish Nemesis” by Larry Silver complement each other nicely, drawing attention to the ways in which propaganda varied and changed as events on the ground unfolded and could reflect not just prejudices but precise knowledge and, at times, even some identification with the “imperial other.” Brummett’s essay is unique in the volume in drawing on Ottoman sources (mostly maps) and for a close reading of images, in contrast to the textual emphasis of the rest of the volume.Another recurring dynamic in the book is the reading of present imperial anxieties in narratives ostensibly about past or distant imperial conflicts. Two strong essays in the collection read the contemporary Mediterranean in discourses about classical Rome: Elizabeth Wright sees a critique of the Crown’s repressive treatment of moriscos in Granada “haunt[ing]” (129) Juan Latino’s Latin epic celebrating the Spanish victory at Lepanto, and Thomas Dandelet reads a series of debates at the Neopolitan Academy over the exact nature of the Roman republic/empire as manifestations of an “imperial angst” (148) and, ultimately, as evidence of a “late Renaissance political think tank” dedicated to the topic of the ethics of imperial rule (155).A further point of intersection between the essays in the volume is an analysis of the forms and limits of propaganda. While the early chapters show that much propaganda was in fact more nuanced than has been previously thought, both Wright and Eric Griffin (“Copying ‘the Anti-Spaniard’: Post-Armada Hispanophobia and English Renaissance Drama”) show that “art” forms—poetry and theater, respectively—were powerful propaganda tools as well. The reading of art as propaganda is hardly new, and Griffin makes explicit that he is not saying that “England’s post-Armada theatre functioned as merely some sort of official state apparatus” (205). In fact, he reads a series of viciously anti-Spanish plays that would seem to go against state interests, representing Elizabethan-era stereotypes in more conciliatory Jacobean times. The persistence and power of anti-Spanish stereotypes is also the subject of Emily Weissbourd’s chapter, in which she contrasts Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and its presentation of a both racially obsessed and racially Other Spaniard, with the Spanish playwright Lope de Vega’s take on the same story (El mayordomo de la duquesa de Amalfi).The final essay would seem to challenge the power of stereotypes and propaganda. William S. Goldman reads the correspondence of Sir Charles Cornwallis, ambassador at the court of Spain from 1605 to 1609, and finds him shedding anti-Spanish prejudice in the company of actual Spaniards. Cornwallis’s early letters back home recite all the Black Legend talking points, but by the end, the ambassador is rather impressed by his hosts and even writing in a proto-Spanglish. Goldman concludes that Cornwallis’s literal and ideological sea change “illuminates the impermanent effect of anti-Spanish propaganda on an Englishman of the age” (236).In short, this volume is a worthwhile read for scholars of early modern empire, particularly Spain and England. Scholars looking for paradigm shifts will not find them here, but they will find well-researched, well-supported, well-written case studies that offer food for thought and future scholarship. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 114, Number 2November 2016 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/686931HistoryPublished online August 31, 2016 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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