Going Beyond Montagu: The Network of Subaltern Women in the Turkish Embassy, 1716–1718
Bibliographic record
Abstract
: This chapter shifts attention from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as a singular traveler to a network of women from diverse class, ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds to complicate and enrich our view of the bilateral movement of early modern women between the British Isles and the Islamic empires of the era. Despite her representation as sui generis , Montagu did not travel alone nor was she the only woman on the “Turkish embassy. The documentary, literary, and visual record suggests she brought female servants from Britain and acquired more servants (and perhaps bought slaves) while in the Ottoman Empire. Rather than looking outwards to the elite Ottoman women Montagu idealizes, this chapter turns to these lower-status women (British and Ottoman) whose lives register as traces in the sources on this embassy. Keywords: Montagu, Ottoman, Turkish, servant, slave Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762), already a glittering figure in the English literary scene, traveled through the Ottoman Empire as far as Constantinople (Istanbul) with her husband, the “Ambassador Extraordinary to the Court of Turkey,” from 1716 to 1718. Her fame was secured with the posthumous publication of Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M--y W---y M----e: Written, during her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa, To Persons of Distinction, Men of Letters, &c. in different Parts of Europe (1763), which derives from the letter-book she drafted during this relatively brief sojourn and polished for the rest of her long life. Teresa Heffernan and Daniel O’Quinn, in their introduction to The Turkish Embassy Letters (the shorthand title for Montagu's travelogue), assert that “it is among the greatest achievements of eighteenth-century literature.” The response to Montagu's achievement has nevertheless been mixed, both in her own day and since. Among contemporary critics, some praise her as “a conscientious ethnographer trying to communicate the humanity of the peoples of another culture”—one “remarkably free of ethnocentrism”—and as “[t]he only relatively early writer to cast doubt on the common assumption of the oppression of Muslim women and to counter notions of their licentiousness.”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".