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COPYRIGHT 2006 Associated University Presses
The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580-1720, by Gerald MacLean. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Pp. xxi + 267. Cloth $59.95.
There is an element of theatricality inherent in MacLean's text, which presents the tales of four travelers and a funeral. Each tale is staged for a particular audience; and the author writes himself subtly into the drama as a latter-day traveler, reliving the sites of his subjects' sojourns. "The Rise of Oriental Travel," according to the author, "retells the stories of four journeys into the Ottoman Mediterranean undertaken by Englishmen during the century before there was a British empire. It is a study of English people encountering Islamic cultures, and so it is also necessarily an enquiry into the global formations of Englishness itself" (xiii). The journey itself, however, its narration, and the personalities of the narrators are the key foci here. As MacLean notes, he has tried, "to recreate, as far as possible, the sense that travel writers themselves seek to create of discovering things as they go" (xvii). Thus the author provides a narration of the narratives, accompanied by substantive historical and literary contextualization. The narrative flow works internally, within each tale and throughout. Each travel account (those of Thomas Dallam, William Biddulph, Henry Blount, and Mr. T.S., accompanied by an epilogue on the disposition of the remains of Lady Anne Glover) is treated as a discrete whole and could thus be detached for class use. Each segment provides a variation on the English travel narrative, while numerous artful allusions to the other segments weave the separate tales into a clear and compelling whole.
MacLean begins his work with a prologue (a translated excerpt from Mustafa bin Ibrahim Safi's history, Zubdet ut-tevarih), an argument (delineating his main points), and a preface (relating his own interaction with the text, the development of his approach, and his rationale for revisiting the sites of the travel tales). In this latter section, he describes himself "not simply as a literary biographer investigating authors, but also in some sense as a biographer of the books themselves" (xviii). The author goes on to note that he regards "with caution all claims to know what an historically remote person actually felt. However, the books they wrote survive and, in some sense, so too do the places they visited; and without the inspiration of those places, the books themselves could not have been written" (xviii). While MacLean does a careful and evocative job of presenting the historiographic setting of the texts, one can take issue with the depth of his caution when evaluating the writers' impressions or self-interpretations.
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