The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580-1720 by Gerald MacLean

Abstract

8i8 Reviews English-language psalmody of the period has to be seen. He tends to concentrate on 'English' (and North American Episcopal) at the expense of 'Scottish' reformed practice. The latter is accorded too fleeting amention in view of the persistence of metrical psalmody into today's Scottish Presbyterian Church, to say nothing of its disappearance during the nineteenth century from the liturgy of the Church of Eng land, a fact of which Hamlin (on the evidence of p. 63 n. 33) seems unaware. Nor, one is bound to admit, is it evident that all the material in the full and impressive bibliography has actually found its way into Hamlin's text, a view confirmed by the incompleteness of the index. The names of Terence Cave and Rivkah Zim are not consistently spelt in bibliography, index, or text. UNIVERSITY OF LEIDEN RICHARD TODD The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to theOttoman Empire, 1580-1720. By GERALDMAcLEAN. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2004. XXii+ 267 PP. ?42.50. ISBN o-333-97364-x. Early in this remarkable book, Gerald MacLean discusses a titillating adventure on theMediterranean island of Zante undertaken by his first 'visitor', Thomas Dallam. Having been held in quarantine for days outside the harbour, Dallam resolves to climb 'a little mountayne' he can see on the island as soon as he 'sett[s] foute on shore'. After a series of incidents he encounters a number of young women who-it later transpires-were offering 'allkinde entertainment' formoney, much to his initial confusion (although he later returns with three shipmates). MacLean concludes the narrative assuring the reader that 'Mount Scopos is still amagical place [. . .]The church and outbuildings Dallam visited have been ruined by earthquakes, but a small chapel has been built within the rubble. It is surrounded by wild oats' (p. 22). This short section encapsulates the abundant qualities of The Rise of Oriental Travel. First and most impressive is the detailed reading of each of these travellers' texts, many of which have not received the attention they merit in a growing field of enquiry. Equally, however, the perfectly captured sense of the different characters, experiences, and responses of each of these men to the places and people that they encounter is a revealing indication of the complexity of English responses to the 'Orient' in this period. Furthermore, the extensive travels of the author himself, allied to a playful sense of humour, make this text both hugely informative and a joy to read. Rescuing Dallam from a history of misquotation and erroneous detail, and in the process offering a valuable insight into the chaos of rivalries, ambition, and fractious ness that was the Protestant English community in Istanbul, MacLean then does a similar service forWilliam Biddulph's Travels, Henry Blount's Voyage, and T.S.'s Adventures. In all of these texts, the balance between hearsay, textual reference, and actual eyewitness account is expertly explored and the notes reveal the scale of both the task and the reading that informs it. The illustrations-both colour and black and-white- are also superb, and are supplemented by photographs from the author's own travels, together offering a keen sense of the potent cocktail of history, politics, economics, and religion that informs notions of the 'Orient', then as now. A characteristic of many studies investigating such notions that have followed Nabil Matar's influential Islam inBritain, I558-I685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I998) has been a determination to deny the application of Edward W Said's Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, I978) to early modern geo-political imaginings and encounters. In The Rise of Oriental Travel MacLean offers a timely intervention in this evolving debate, arguing for (and offering) amore nuanced ap proach and a re-examination of Said's key theoretical ideas. This ismost evident in MLR, IO1.3, 2oo6 8I9 his discussion of Henry Blount's Voyage, an attempt to understand the Ottoman Em pire in terms of a 'general theory of world empires' (p. I35). Blount was by no means the first to pursue such a notion, but MacLean rightly suggests that this approach 'strongly anticipate[s] the phase of rational inquiry into the Islamic world that...