The Lives of Girls and Women from the Islamic World in Early Modern British Literature and Culture

"Bernadette Andrea has crafted an extremely impressive book that examines in a highly sophisticated manner the history of Islamic girls and women in Britain. Andrea's research is remarkable and this book is of great importance to the developing scholarship on early modern England's connections with the rest of the world." -- Carole Levin, Willa Cather Professor of History, University of Nebraska "The Lives of Girls and Women from the Islamic World in Early Modern British Literature and Culture is an extraordinarily well-researched book that offers a substantive and persuasive rereading of the ways in which women from Central Asia and North Africa figured in discourses of international trade, imperial longing, and Britain's national self-fashioning. It serves as a model of how to recover and interpret the traces of marginalized women. Andrea's work is extremely impressive and makes a significant contribution to scholarship on race, gender, and empire in the early modern era. -- Robert Markley, W. D. and Sara E. Trowbridge Professor of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Bernadette Andrea’s groundbreaking study recovers and reinterprets the lives of women from the Islamic world who travelled, with varying degrees of volition, as slaves, captives, or trailing wives to Scotland and England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Bernadette Andrea’s groundbreaking study recovers and reinterprets the lives of women from the Islamic world who travelled, with varying degrees of volition, as slaves, captives, or trailing wives to Scotland and England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Andrea’s thorough and insightful analysis of historical documents, visual records, and literary works focuses on five extraordinary women: Elen More and Lucy Negro, both from Islamic West Africa; Ipolita the Tartarian, a girl acquired from Islamic Central Asia; Teresa Sampsonia, a Circassian from the Safavid Empire; and Mariam Khanim, an Armenian from the Mughal Empire. By analysing these women’s lives and their impact on the literary and cultural life of proto-colonial England, Andrea reveals that they are simultaneously significant constituents of the emerging Anglo-centric discourse of empire and cultural agents in their own right. The Lives of Girls and Women from the Islamic World in Early Modern British Literature and Culture advances a methodology based on microhistory, cross-cultural feminist studies, and postcolonial approaches to the early modern period.