Practices of Coexistence: Constructions of the Other in Early Modern Perceptions - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9633861497 ISBN 13: 9789633861493

Publisher: Central European University Press, 2017

Synopsis

The essays in this book provide interesting contributions to the ongoing debate concerning the "image of the Other" in the early modern period. They deal with images, representations, projections, and perceptions, based on various experiences of coexistence. Although the individual contributions contain sources and references of iconography, this is not just another volume of art history or visual studies. As examples of practices in diverse historical contexts, the book includes a variety of textual material, such as literary productions, rhetorical exercises, dramatic applications, chronicles, epistles, and diary type historical accounts with ethnographic sensitivities. Thus, supported by a thorough research apparatus, these studies propose a new cultural history of the early modern coexistence of various communities, as identified in current research by young scholars. Their contributions either offer revisionist perspectives on their chosen subjects or suggest new interpretations. Another novel feature of the volume is the deliberate displacement of traditional scholarly foci to an investigation of rarely examined regions and practices. This approach allows the contributors to present their special areas of research and to share an off-centered vision of "the Renaissance" instead of the grand narrative of previous scholarship.

About this title

About the Author

Marianna D. Birnbaum is Research Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages at UCLA. She is also involved in the Medieval Studies Department's programs at the Central European University, Budapest. Marcell Sebok is a cultural historian of the early modern period at the Department of Medieval Studies of Central European University, Budapest

Review

Kudos to Marianna Birnbaum and Marcell Sebok for bringing together this splendid collection of essays on representation across cultural borders, especially the Christian/Muslim border in the 15th through 17th century. Along with western views, we hear for the first time voices from Eastern Europe, from Hungarians writing of Suleyman the Magnificent, Moldavians of the Ottoman threat, and more. Drawing from poetry, theatre, histories, travel accounts, letters, and paintings, the authors give us a picture more complex than the binary of Us and the Other. Practices of Coexistence speaks to our own time, when understanding of cultural difference is more urgent than ever. --Natalie Zemon Davis, University of Toronto

The issue this volume is addresses, the construction of the other , came to the focus of historical research several decades ago, with the anthropological turn . Recent political developments refugee crisis, terrorism incited by the IS, xenophobic right-wing turn in politics gave this theme again a burning actuality. The place from where these studies were issued, was a seminar at CEU, an international university, where many kinds of others are studying together: the authors of this volume are Croatian, Hungarian, Romanian and Turkish taught by the cooperation an American and a Hungarian scholar. The central theme of the studies is the perception of the Muslim and the Jewish other in Latin and Orthodox Christianity, in regions which have been, for many centuries, battlefields for different ethnicities, religions, empires: South-Eastern Europe and North Africa. The crucial period discussed is the conflict-ridden Early Modernity. The essays show, with rich documentation and up-to-date conceptual tools that besides the bloody conflicts there developed noteworthy practices of coexistence, traditions from which we can still learn. --Gábor Klaniczay, Central European University, Budapest

This collection of studies on Constructions of the Other in Early Modern Perceptions brings together a group of young historians whose major concern is with the stereotypical images of the Ottoman Other, of which Edward Said s Orientalism has made us uncomfortably aware. Yet, they generally agree that the superiority complex supposedly legitimized by science, vis à vis an immobile Orient ripe for European domination, was not yet in place in the Middle Ages and/or the sixteenth century. Admittedly, certain elements which later went into the conglomerate known as orientalism, came from medieval anti-Islamic polemics and also from humanist constructions of civilization; they, therefore, already existed in the 1400s and 1500s. By highlighting both Ottoman and local Balkan concerns and opinions, in addition to the better-known Spanish, French and English varieties, the present collection enlarges the reader s perspective on the thorny question of how orientalism, Saidian-style, came into being. Last but not least, these studies are well organized and stimulating to read. --Suraiya Faroqhi, Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul

Edition details

• Publisher: Central European University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 9633861497
• ISBN 13: 9789633861493
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 242
• Editor: Birnbaum Marianna D., Sebők Marcell