From Invasion to Inquisition: Mapping Malta in Early Modern England

Abstract

In thus theorizing “The Strange Effects of Ordinary Space,” Patricia Yaeger points toward a fundamental aporia in literary and cultural studies of early modern Malta: the always-already effaced indigenes of the island.1 As in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, numerous colonial and countercolonial contests striate this profoundly overdetermined locale, positioned roughly between the coast of Sicily and the coast of modern Libya (the site of early modern Tunis and ancient Carthage). In The Tempest, a similarly situated Mediterranean island stages the struggle between Prospero, the newest invader, and Caliban, the previous invader now subject to the current colonial hegemony. The indigenes of the island, however, emerge in the play as “what is hidden, encrypted, repressed, or unspoken” through Caliban’s famous paean: “Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.”2 Similarly, Maltese history from antiquity through the early modern period involves successive invasions by the Phoenicians (ninth century BC), the Carthaginians (eighth and seventh century BC), the Romans (fourth century BC to sixth century AD, with an influential landing by St. Paul in the first century and a possible occupation by the North African Vandals in the fifth century), the Byzantine Greeks (the sixth century AD), the Muslim Arabs (from AD 870, establishing the Maltese language as a cognate of Arabic), the Normans (from AD 1061), and the Aragonese (from AD 1283).