The Renaissance and the Ottoman World

This volume brings together some of the latest research on the cultural, intellectual, and commercial interactions during the Renaissance between Western Europe and the Middle East, with particular reference to the Ottoman Empire. Recent scholarship has brought to the fore the economic, political, cultural, and personal interactions between Western European Christian states and the Eastern Mediterranean Islamic states, and has therefore highlighted the incongruity of conceiving of an iron curtain bisecting the mentalities of the various socio-political and religious communities located in the same Euro-Mediterranean space. Instead, the emphasis here is on interpreting the Mediterranean as a world traversed by trade routes and associated cultural and intellectual networks through which ideas, people and goods regularly travelled.