The author of this book, William Lithgow, a man who lived in the 16th century, famed for his journeys on foot across various parts of the world, including Spain, Turkey, France, and Egypt. Lithgow seems to have started his travels at a very early age, having 'a large infusion of the wandering spirit common to his country-men.' He claims that his 'painful feet traced over (beside my passages of Seas and Rivers) thirty-six thousand and odd miles, which draws near to twice the circumference of the whole Earth.'
In the period between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries a considerable number of Scots migrated to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Some sojourned there for some time, while others stayed permanently and exercised commercial business and crafts. The migration stopped in the eighteenth century, and the Scots who remained in Poland seem to have lost their ethnic identity. This book offers an examination and assessment of this migration: numbers of migrants; patterns of settlement; laws regulating Scottish presence in Poland-Lithuania; their commercial, academic, religious and military activities; their social advancement into the Polish nobility; their assimilation and then the eventual disappearance as a distinct ethnic group in Poland-Lithuania.
The captivity narrative has always been a literary genre associated with America. Joe Snader argues, however, that captivity narratives emerged much earlier in Britain, coinciding with European colonial expansion, the development of anthropology, and the rise of liberal political thought. Stories of Europeans held captive in the Middle East, America, Africa, and Southeast Asia appeared in the British press from the late sixteenth through the late eighteenth centuries, and captivity narratives were frequently featured during the early development of the novel. Until the mid-eighteenth century, British examples of the genre outpaced their American cousins in length, frequency of publication, attention to anthropological detail, and subjective complexity. Using both new and canonical texts, Snader shows that foreign captivity was a favorite topic in eighteenth-century Britain. An adaptable and expansive genre, these narratives used set plots and stereotypes originating in Mediterranean power struggles and relocated in a variety of settings, particularly eastern lands. The narratives' rhetorical strategies and cultural assumptions often grew out of centuries of religious strife and coincided with Europe's early modern military ascendancy. Caught Between Worlds presents a broad, rich, and flexible definition of the captivity narrative, placing the American strain in its proper place within the tradition as a whole. Snader, having assembled the first bibliography of British captivity narratives, analyzes both factual texts and a large body of fictional works, revealing the ways they helped define British identity and challenged Britons to rethink the place of their nation in the larger world.
The articles selected for this anthology of travel and colonial writing in the English Renaissance period represent the world-picture of 16th and 17th century English readers. The extracts are grouped geographically and prefaced by headnotes.
Discussing a series of economic, confessional, political and espionage networks, this volume provides an illuminating study of network history in Northern Europe in the early modern period. The empirically researched chapters advance existing 'social network theory' into accessible historical discussion.
This collection makes a unique contribution to the study of anti-Muslim prejudice by placing the issue in both its past and present context. The essays cover historical and contemporary subjects from the eleventh century to the present day. They examine the forms that anti-Muslim prejudice takes, the historical influences on these forms, and how they relate to other forms of prejudice such as racism, antisemitism or sexism, and indeed how anti-Muslim prejudice becomes institutionalized. This volume looks at anti-Muslim prejudice from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, including politics, sociology, philosophy, history, international relations, law, cultural studies and comparative literature. The essays contribute to our understanding of the different levels at which anti-Muslim prejudice emerges and operates - the local, the national and the transnational – by also including case studies from a range of contexts including Britain, Europe and the US. This book contributes to a deeper understanding of contemporary political problems and controversial topics, such as issues that focus on Muslim women: the 'headscarf' debates, honour killings and forced marriages. There is also analysis of media bias in the representation of Muslims and Islam, and other urgent social and political issues such as the social exclusion of European Muslims and the political mobilisation against Islam by far-right parties. This book was published as a special issue of Patterns of Prejudice.
