In recent years there has been a dynamic interest in early modern representations of ethnic difference. Studies of early modern drama and travel writing have sought to decipher the power plays present in depictions of Islamic cultures and empires. Characterised sometimes by both historians and scholars of early modern literature as ‘ethnographies’, the numerous traveller’s accounts of the Ottoman Empire and their portrayals of peoples and religions provided their readers with representations shaped and motivated by religious polemic, search for knowledge, and material for the better understanding of the formations and functions of empire.

This paper seeks a new framework for looking at early modern English portrayals of Levantine peoples: a framework that takes into account not only the search for eyewitness-information and knowledge, but also the polemical elements and religious bias present in these writings. I will argue, that early modern English writings about the Ottoman Levant can’t be reduced under the rubric of ‘ethnography’ alone, but should rather be seen as complex products of self-fashioning, as investigations of collective religious identities and loyalties, and as searches for historical knowledge, both for polemical and non-polemical purposes. Following the advice of Natalie Zemon Davis, and reserving the word ‘identity’ to refer to the ‘external marks that are part of social relations’ rather than to mean ‘inner issues of subjectivity’, I will look at formations of early modern ethno-religious identities in the Levant by paying special attention to the Levant Company chaplain William Biddulph’s depictions of Eastern Christians.

—Eva Johanna Holmberg, University of Helsinki and Queen Mary, University of London