Early Modern Tales of Orient

Book excerpt: Early Modern Tales of Orient is the first volume to collect together these travellers' tales and make them available to today's students and scholars. By introducing a fascinating array of accounts (of exploration, diplomatic, and commercial ventures), Kenneth Parker challenges widely-held assumptions about Early Modern encounters in the Orient. The documents assembled in Early Modern Tales of Orient have extraordinary resonance for us today. Many of the discourses which in part, emerged from those early encounters - such as Islamophobia, English Nationalism, and the Catholic/Protestant divide - are still active in contemporary society. This volume sheds a unique light on the development of a very English interest in 'the exotic'.