Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Cambridge University Press
Published:31st May '13
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This book explores how the figure of the Prophet Muhammad was misrepresented in English and wider Christian culture between 1480 and 1735.
The figure of 'Mahomet' was widely known in early modern England. A grotesque version of the Prophet Muhammad, Mahomet was a product of vilification, caricature and misinformation placed at the centre of Christian conceptions of Islam. In Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture Matthew Dimmock draws on an eclectic range of early modern sources - literary, historical, visual - to explore the nature and use of Mahomet in a period bounded by the beginnings of print and the early Enlightenment. This fabricated figure and his spurious biography were endlessly recycled, but also challenged and vindicated, and the tales the English told about him offer new perspectives on their sense of the world - its geographies and religions, near and far - and their place within it. This book explores the role played by Mahomet in the making of Englishness, and reflects on what this might reveal about England's present circumstances.
'Dr Dimmock has broken new ground, not only in his excavation of neglected English sources from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but also by his close reading of a wider range of writings than has hitherto been assembled in one place … This book furnishes a detailed and vivid sense of the varied ways in which the early modern English constructed and used the person of Mahomet/Muhammad in the articulation of their own identities, world views and notions of self. As such, it provides a suggestive and instructive point of reference and of self-interrogation for any reader inclined to a historically grounded and culturally contextualized understanding of the many and often-fraught ongoing twenty-first-century Western engagements with the Prophet of Islam.' Shahab Ahmed, Harvard University
'… the book synthesizes and makes accessible a fascinating and important set of texts … a very welcome contribution to the field.' Joel Elliot Slotkin, Modern Philology
ISBN: 9781107032910
Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 21mm
Weight: 620g
308 pages