Eric Dursteler

• PhD
• Professor at Brigham Young University

This article explores the Roman Inquisition’s interest in the dietary practices of suspected heretics throughout the Roman Catholic Mediterranean. In an era marked by rampant religious nomadism and a deep uncertainty about assaying and fixing confessional identity, dietary practices were often used to determine religious belonging. For the Roman In...

The early modern Mediterranean was a space of expansive linguistic mixing, and multilingual discourse was a common response to the exigencies of communication within this context. There is a growing body of scholarship on male multilingualism; however, women have been largely overlooked. This article argues that far from marginalized outsiders, as...

Tobias P. Graf, The Sultan's Renegades: Christian-European Converts to Islam and the Making of the Ottoman Elite, 1575–1610 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Pp. 283. $99.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780198791430 - Volume 50 Issue 4 - Eric R. Dursteler

This chapter examines religious identity, and in particular conversion, in the early modern Mediterranean through the prism of gender. It surveys attitudes towards women’s religiosity and their susceptibility to conversion from Muslim, Jewish and Christian perspectives, and will compare and contrast the motivations for conversion of men and women....

The early modern period was an age of expansive religious refashioning and upheaval. In the Mediterranean this was the golden age of the renegade, as converts, particularly from Christianity to Islam, were termed. While fear was almost universally evoked in these cases, there is ample evidence of widespread voluntary conversion in the Mediterranean...

During the early modern era foodways were an important signifier of identity. This is evident in the extensive body of literature produced by the growing number of Europeans who ventured into the Mediterranean, especially the lands of the Ottoman Empire. These travelers commented at length on the foods they encountered, their preparation, and how t...

Food and attitudes toward it were transformed in Renaissance Europe. The period between 1300 and 1600 saw the discovery of the New World and the cultivation of new foodstuffs, as well as the efflorescence of culinary literature in European courts and eventually in the popular press, and most importantly the transformation of the economy on a global...

This volume grew out of a 2007 conference held in Milan, which brought together scholars from France, Great Britain, and Italy to consider the European response to Islam over the course of the long seventeenth century. Organizationally, the book begins with an introduction that places the somewhat disparate essays into dialogue with one another and...

Since at least the time of Leopold von Ranke, the famed final reports, or relazioni, of the Venetian ambassadors have enjoyed a unique reputation among historical testimonies. Historians have often viewed the Venetian ambassadors as dispassionate and sophisticated witnesses of the courts in which they served, and treated their reports, often uncrit...

For the past century, the field of Mediterranean Studies has been primarily dominated by two paradigms that appear on the surface, at least, to be mutually exclusive: the bifurcated Mediterranean of the battlefield, and the linked Mediterranean suggested by the region's many bazaars and other places of encounter and exchange. But when the dotted li...

Conversion was a common phenomenon in the early modern Mediterranean, and in most instances, individual apostasies from Islam or Christianity warranted minimal response. The conversion of women, however, and particularly women of status, elicited a more significant reaction. Both Ottoman and Venetian ruling elites attributed particular significance...

During the last decades of the sixteenth century, Beatrice Michiel fled an unhappy marriage in Venice for Constantinople. She converted to Islam, taking the name of Fatima, remarried, and because of her access to the imperial harem, played a significant role in Veneto-Ottoman relations in this troubled period. Beatrice/Fatima's experience provides...

Over the course of almost a decade, an interdisciplinary group comprising dozens of scholars drawn from throughout the European Union, supplemented with a small number of non-Europeans, met in a series of meetings organized under the auspices of the European Science Foundation. The stated objective of this project was to investigate the cultural ro...

Historian Eric R Dursteler reconsiders identity in the early modern world to illuminate Veneto-Ottoman cultural interaction and coexistence, challenging the model of hostile relations and suggesting instead a more complex understanding of the intersection of cultures. Although dissonance and strife were certainly part of this relationship, he argue...

During the early modern era, the island of Milos was an important crossroads for travellers, merchants and corsairs. In 1637, the galleasses of the Venetian fleet docked in the port, and took on four passengers, a widow and her three daughters. The eldest daughter was married to the kadi, the island's most important Ottoman official. Dissatisified...

One of the time-honored approaches of Western scholarship to Islam has been the literature of image, which treats the rhetorical views employed by Christian Europe of the Islamic East. Works in this genre abound, including C. D.Rouillard's The Turk in French History, Thought and Literature, Samuel Chew's The Crescent and the Rose, R. W. Southern's...

Le commerce en Mediterranee, vers la fin du XVI e siecle, est souvent decrit comme divise rigidement entre des musulmans et des chretiens n'ayant que peu de rencontres significatives. Selon l'optique traditionnelle, les marchands musulmans ne voyageaient que rarement dans les pays chretiens, et le systeme d'echange passait principalement par des in...

During the difficult sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Venice attempted to maintain a precarious balance with its powerful neighbour the Ottoman Empire. The key to this effort was the chief Venetian diplomat in Constantinople, the bailo. The complexities of defending Venice's position in the Mediterranean required the ablest possible officials....

Of the many European states that interacted with the Ottoman Empire in the early modern era, few did so as extensively as the Most Serene Republic of Venice, La Serenissima . The two empires shared a lengthy border and a common historical trajectory for almost 500 years, during which time the political and economic fortunes of both were intimately...