This article explores the Roman Inquisition’s interest in the dietary practices of suspected heretics throughout the Roman Catholic Mediterranean. In an era marked by rampant religious nomadism and a deep uncertainty about assaying and fixing confessional identity, dietary practices were often used to determine religious belonging. For the Roman Inquisition, non-conforming diets served as a clue to potentially more serious spiritual infractions. In the early modern Mediterranean, what one ate was considered a sign of what one believed.
The early modern Mediterranean was a space of expansive linguistic mixing, and multilingual discourse was a common response to the exigencies of communication within this context. There is a growing body of scholarship on male multilingualism; however, women have been largely overlooked. This article argues that far from marginalized outsiders, as they were often depicted, women were active participants in the Mediterranean linguistic ecology. They developed communication strategies and techniques to navigate language difference in trade, travel, work, diplomatic, and domestic settings. The numerous and varied spaces that they occupied were not barriers but doorways to their participation in the multilingual Mediterranean.
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Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsVenice’s Secret Service: Organizing Intelligence in the Renaissance. By Ioanna Iordanou. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv+264. $40.00.Eric R. DurstelerEric R. DurstelerBrigham Young University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 93, Number 3September 2021 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/715314 Views: 52Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
Probably because cross-confessional, Mediterranean interaction is believed to have been in itself exceptional, a good deal of Ottoman history contents itself with description. The work under review goes beyond this narrow approach with an analytical, if not always problematic, quest for a casuistic view of piracy and litigation issues. White’s research is indebted to a revolutionary aspect of Ottoman history: unlike their medieval predecessors, Ottoman notarial practice was entrusted to kadis who endowed all their deeds with permanent validity and kept judicial archives. White is nonetheless aware of the limitations of Islamic court records, such as the summary transcriptions and the cumulative, chaotic character of registers, or sicils. To a greater extent, the chapter addresses one of the major problems of crossconfessional relations: the extent to which non-Muslim merchants and actors, for whom shariah presented wellknown biases and procedural obstacles, such as witnessing, made use of such courts. It also provides us with good descriptions of parallel jurisdictions such as the Kazasker and the Imperial Council. The chapter discusses a lawsuit passed before the kadi Sunullah Efendi, who later became şeyhülislam and authored the first fatwa collection dealing with piracy issues at length. We can see Sunullah at work in a 1594 case involving the Janissary Mahmud, that presented evidentiary problems and required careful handling of proof and evidence. White’s approach to court records offers more than a literal, legalistic reading. The chapter looks into the motivations and strategies of the plaintiffs, often non-Muslims, particularly for those cases where the procedural limitations of Islamic law would have made a positive outcome unlikely. Thick descriptions and a microhistorical approach substantiates one of White’s major arguments, namely, that what characterized the Ottoman Mediterranean was the actors’ awareness – be they foreign unbelievers, zimmis or Muslims – of the intricacies of Islamic law, a skill they exhibited when bringing their claims to court.
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Reviewed by: The Warm South: How the Mediterranean Shaped the British Imagination by Robert Holland Eric R. Dursteler (bio) The Warm South: How the Mediterranean Shaped the British Imagination, by Robert Holland; pp. xiv + 317. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018, $35.00. Each summer millions of British vacationers disgorge from discount airlines at destinations across the Mediterranean. Some are drawn by the region's rich history and culture, many more by its beaches and nightlife. Few are likely aware that they follow in the footsteps of generations of forebears on a quintessentially British pilgrimage. In his highly erudite and captivating book The Warm South: How the Mediterranean Shaped the British Imagination, Robert Holland explores the deep roots of this British sentiment for the Mediterranean and the role that it has played in British culture. While British connections to the sea date back to at least Roman times, Holland argues that it is only beginning in the mid-eighteenth century that the Mediterranean began to function as a "laboratory for ideological, political and cultural struggles within Britain" (4). Increased interaction and rivalry in this period gave rise to a cultural inferiority complex vis-à-vis France and, to a lesser extent, Germany. Though its political, [End Page 126] industrial, and economic stars were in ascendance, the British gentry felt a nagging suspicion that they were "crude and untutored" and that a glaring cultural gap separated them from their continental kin (5). The Mediterranean provided a prepackaged, esteemed legacy that Britons might co-opt, transfer, and translate into a cultural hybrid that partly filled this void, while also serving as a touchstone for comprehending and living in the modern world. This multi-century instinct was "riveted" into the British national psyche and experience (259). The book is organized in a half-dozen chapters with a straightforward chronological structure and a fluid narrative format. Each follows a set pattern: the primary focus is on Italy, followed by Greece, with Spain usually treated more cursorily. This is a high cultural history in the traditional sense: elite poets, artists, writers, and sculptors own the stage. Indeed, the cast of characters is a who's who of British society: Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Benjamin Disraeli, John Ruskin, William Gladstone, John Singer Sargent, and Robert Graves. Everyone who was anyone traveled at the very least to Italy, and many set down roots, usually in British hothouses that isolated them from the uncouth local heirs of these formerly great lands. The book begins in the pivotal period 1740 to 1800: this is when the Grand Tour became an essential element in the finishing school for noble men and a growing number of women. Italy occupied pride of place on the itinerary; Greece, while highly prized, was more distant and thus less often visited; Spain was generally avoided for historical and religious reasons. The eruption of Napoleon onto the scene was profoundly disruptive both politically and psychologically for Britons seeking to parse their standing in the world. The early Victorian period, 1830 to 1860, while on the surface a time of growing power and confidence, was actually characterized by significant "fears of individual and collective decay" (111). During the high Victorian period, 1860 to 1890, the Mediterranean preserved its centrality within what was a fundamentally conservative British culture. Elevation and imitation of the past served as a familiar and reliable aesthetic counterweight to the revolutionary changes that were disrupting and energizing the continent. "Cultural despair" combined with "a sense of national fragility" (192) and the enduring sense of a British "aesthetic void" characterized the years preceding the Great War (193). Some turned to vibrant continental cultural centers for inspiration, but more often modernism was processed through the familiar Mediterranean cult of beauty. In the post-war era, classicism provided a familiar harbor for a healing civilization. During the Second World War the Mediterranean was the most important British front after the homeland, and following the war the region once again became an escape for Britons fleeing the home-front's "cultural deadness" (249) and the enduring "unresolved confusion" about Britain's cultural identity and relevance (262). Beyond simply providing a cultural education, the Mediterranean was profoundly...
The Making of the Modern Mediterranean: Views from the South grew out of a 2013 conference at Georgetown University, “The Mediterranean Re-imagined,” which was convened in memory of the late historian of the early modern Mediterranean and Georgetown faculty member, Faruk Tabak. As the title suggests, the objective of the conference and the collected volume was to rethink the Mediterranean from the perspective of its southern shore. This is not, of course, a new idea. When the father of modern Mediterranean studies, Fernand Braudel, settled on the sea as the focus of his dissertation in the 1930s, inspired by his years as a teacher in French Algeria, he determined to approach his topic “upside down,” as he described it, that is from the south looking north, rather than from the traditional, obverse vantage point. In doing so, he hoped to break down the “walled gardens” that constrained history within narrow political and cultural boundaries, and instead to engage the sea's past with a wide-angle lens.Despite Braudel's manifesto, as editor Judith Tucker points out in her valuable introduction, Mediterranean studies have tended to favor the sea's northern over its southern and eastern shores. The notion that Arab and Turkish voices have remained “rather faint” (10) in the field, however, strikes me as debatable, and this lopsidedness should not be overstated. Ottomanists such as the great Turkish historian Ömer Lûtfi Barkan were among the earliest to engage with Braudel, and there is now a long and rich list of important studies that approach the sea from the eastern and southern flanks that this volume aims to privilege. Indeed, the past two decades have seen a flourishing of work by young scholars working on the Mediterranean from both the bottom up and the outside in, including Tabak's own The Waning of the Mediterranean, 1550–1870: A Geo-Historical Approach (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), which appeared shortly after his death, and is a brilliant and expansive reading of the transformations and adaptations that characterized the early modern Mediterranean.Tucker's introduction efficiently surveys the broad trends of the field, from Braudel to his intellectual heirs, Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, whose The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), re-energized Mediterranean studies and prompted a proliferation of new scholarship from all corners of the sea. She notes that scholars have often fallen on different sides of the eternal debate on Mediterranean unity, depending on their field of study. Environmental and economic historians, for instance, have generally favored the paradigm, while historians of politics, culture, and religion have been more ambivalent. Tucker argues that modern political agendas have also informed and deformed Mediterranean studies when it served their purposes and European politicians and scholars with imperialist ambitions readily linked their agendas to ancient Rome with visions of restoring the integrity of the region. This is most evident in, but certainly not limited to, Mussolini's ideology of Romanitas. Among Arab and Muslim scholars, in contrast, postcolonial scholarship often favored nationalist discourses over notions of pan-Mediterranean connectedness. Recent political developments in the region, in particular surging migration and sectarian violence, have led Europeans to abandon notions of cross- Mediterranean unity in favor of nationalist policies that emphasize difference and disconnection and envision the sea as a barrier. All this is to say that Mediterranean studies has tended to privilege a European perspective and, as Tucker asserts, the volume aims to foster “a more inclusive study” (9) of the region by bringing the experiences and perspectives of the sea's more understudied shores more fully into the conversation.One of the most intriguing essays in the collection, and the one that most directly addresses the premise of the volume, is by Nabil Matar. He traces Arab views and representations of the Mediterranean from the Middle Ages on and argues that they differed significantly from those of both Europeans and Ottomans. The application of the notion of the Mediterranean as a unified space was largely a product of early modern European writers and did not take hold among Arabs until well into the colonial era. Prior to this the sea was commonly known as Rūmī, or the sea of the Europeans. For Arabs the Mediterranean separated and divided rather than connected and unified, and indeed was often viewed as a space of danger that at any moment threatened abduction and perhaps forced conversion.Piracy and slavery are the focus of two of the volume's best essays. Joshua White examines the practice of what he terms “slave laundering”: For over a half century following Lepanto, Ottoman Christian subjects in the Aegean, Ionian, and Morean regions were regularly captured by fellow Ottoman corsairs and pirates, commonly working in consort with imperial officials, and then sold in the slave markets of North Africa. The sultans were largely unable to protect their subjects or prevent this trade as the center's ability to control governors on the empire's northern and southern Mediterranean peripheries weakened. At the heart of the practice lay the intractable question of subjecthood and religious identity and how this could be proven in the fluid interstices of the sea. Ottoman jurists repeatedly weighed in on this issue, as did officials in other political and religious contexts, but this did not resolve the practical difficulties of establishing who was legitimate prey for Muslim or Christian corsairs. Slave laundering was possible because of connections between the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, but also due to their detachment.In her own contribution Judith Tucker argues that a pan-Mediterranean culture and protocol of piracy evolved in the eighteenth century, which established a “common regulatory system” (124) of shared legal and institutional norms and practices. North African and European jurists drew on their diverse legal traditions to confront and attempt to control piracy in ways that at times converged in both theory and practice. This included systems of authorization of piratical activity, the development of passports to ensure safe conduct moving across the sea, an expanding system of maritime courts and consuls, and growing numbers of reciprocal treaties that enshrined piracy as a “legitimate business” that required “joint regulation” (139). Despite the sometimes tenuous capacity of Mediterranean polities to assert their authority, pirates often accepted political interventions because of the benefits that conforming to these norms brought. This process resulted in a sea of “shared understandings, if not always tranquility” (143), which was only upended at the dawn of the modern era.Another group of essays clusters around Mediterranean literatures. In an engaging, if occasionally uneven, chapter Osama Abi-Mershed examines the Saint-Simonian author Michel Chevalier's Système de la Mèditerranée, a series of articles published in France in 1832. For Chevalier the long conflict between Islam and Christianity was “the most colossal, the most sweeping, and the most deeply-rooted” (162) division the world had known. He believed that scientific progress could overcome the sea's historic divisions and reunite its peoples in “the nuptial bed” (149). Despite the optimism of Chevalier's vision, Abi-Mershed argues, at its core is an imperialist notion of the West's superiority and its civilizing mission vis-à-vis the decadent Orient. In the Enlightenment worldview Occidental rationality distinguished it from the “decomposing Ottoman body and … archaic Islamic civilization” (164–65). Rather than futile conquests, such as Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, Chevalier envisioned a soft, or “moral” (165) expansion of both Enlightenment and revolutionary ideas and ideals, with the concomitant extension of French power and influence in the region through industry, technology, capital, and communications. At its core, this vision is largely a repackaged rationalization for European expansion into and domination of Islamic lands.William Granara's piece is situated more squarely within the sea's southern littoral and addresses the issue of Mediterranean unity more explicitly. Drawing on the work of the Tunisian writer Zīn al-‘Abdīn al-Sanūsī, Granara argues that Tunisian literature in the 1930s and 1940s was linguistically, culturally, and politically Arabic, but at the same time it was Mediterranean in terms of its geography, “historical consciousness,” and its cross-cultural aesthetic and attitude (175). Granara views Sanūsī and other Tunisian writers of the era as responding to Louis Bertrand's 1899 canonical epic of the French pied-noir conquest of Algeria, Le Sang des races, whose racialized narrative marginalizes the Islamic era as a “simple hiatus” from the authentic, Latin history of North Africa, which was reasserted by European colonial domination. Sanūsī both challenges French hegemony and reasserts Muslim and Arab legitimacy by using fictional historical narratives that present these latter as authentic Mediterranean entities whose historical presence was as deep and legitimate as that of any European state. For Sanūsī the Mediterranean was not “monolithic or unified”; rather, it was a shared space and contact zone in which diverse cultures have interacted with both antagonism and “peaceful coexistence” (195).As is often the case in collected volumes, the quality and relevance to the larger theme of the contributions can be inconsistent. Julia Clancy-Smith's essay draws frequently, sometimes verbatim, on her excellent book, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). Peppered with intriguing nuggets on topics such as language, shipwrecks, and swimming, the essay swings from the minute to the broad with a lack of clearly articulated diachronic parameters. Although it posits several suggestive avenues of inquiry, these are not fully pursued, and it ends up feeling like a hodgepodge of parts lacking a clear focus or direction. Similarly, Edmund Burke III's contribution is a minimally revised reprint of an article published in 2013 that proposes rather imprecisely to examine the Mediterranean and modernity within a broad global context. The essay is synthetic, and while a number of suggestive ideas are raised, it is ultimately weighed down by problematic generalizations on notions of Mediterranean staticity, decline, and civilizational conflict that felt past their expiration date when the piece was originally published and are even more passé today. It is unclear why the piece was republished here.In the final analysis I found this volume both intriguing and uneven. I am not sure that the volume says anything particularly new or revealing about the sea: Some of the authors engage the question of Mediterranean unity and connectedness, as well as the utility of the sea as an analytical category head on, others only minimally and obliquely. I found the volume more of a collation of somewhat disparate essays that serve a largely compensatory role by attempting to tilt the balance of Mediterranean studies a bit more toward the south primarily, but also the east. Even there, several of the essays effectively come at the Mediterranean from the top down, with only minimal gestures to the south. This is not to say that this volume is not valuable; on the contrary a number of the essays are excellent in their specificity, even if they do not address the larger themes that the premise dangles tantalizingly. Taken as a whole, this is a modest collection that does a nice job of inviting us to continue in the endeavor begun by Braudel and embraced now by several intervening generations of scholars, and to think harder about the Mediterranean as a space, and about the interplay of its southern, eastern, western, and northern shores.
