Representing Imperial Rivalry in the Early Modern Mediterranean ed. by Barbara Fuchs and Emily Weissbourd (review)

The articles assembled in this collection derive from a 2011–12 series of conferences held at the Clark Library on the topic of "Rivalry and Rhetoric in the Early Modern Mediterranean." They represent roughly half of the papers presented in those meetings and reflect recent developments and patterns of rethinking in the field of Mediterranean studies. In particular, the work here offers to flesh out Laura Doyle's call for "inter-imperiality" in studies of empire, challenging "the self-sufficient history of empires by arguing for their imbrication and competition."

The collection is divided into two sections, with the first offering a multi-disciplinary survey of visual and textual materials taken up with a conference subtopic, "Envisioning Empire in the Old World." Here Ania Loomba's opening article signals a move to supplement Fernand Braudel's longue duree approach to the Mediterranean with a spatial expansiveness, demonstrating how even the seemingly capacious category of "the Mediterranean in fact belies the region's entanglements with older [and more disparate] geographies." In this context, Loomba recognizes that the perennial struggle to place Shakespeare's The Tempest in any single geography should serve as a reminder "that oceans flow into one another, and they intersect with land routes to create maps that were crucial to the making of early modern circuits of commerce, empire and slavery."

Those imperial intersections, and particularly the rivalries they occasioned, inform the six remaining articles in this section. A number of the articles attempt to deliver on the editors' promise to "recover the complex registers of imperial competition." Yet few are as ambitious or as theoretically informed as Loomba's opening salvo. Chapters by Palmira Brummett and Larry Silver examine visual representations of a contested Mediterranean world. Brummett's examination of Hapsburg and Ottoman maps yields the conclusion that maps on both sides obscured the fact that frontier zones were "areas of compromise and conviviality (as well as hostility), and of shifting or serial identities." Silver's chapter catalogues artworks depicting the same ambivalence in Hapsburg views of Turks but suffers from a lack of illustrations. Another instance of ambivalence is located in Elizabeth Wright's chapter on Juan Latino, the first black African writer to have published a book of poetry in a European language. As Wright explains, Latino wrote Austrias Carmen, his epic depicting the Christian victory at Lepanto, under the patronage of Pedro de Deza y Guzman, a notoriously hardline inquisitor. So, ironically, the freedman found himself memorializing the actions of the same commanders who had ravaged Latino's Moorish countrymen in Granada. Chapters by Carina L. Johnson, Andrew W. Devereux, and Thomas Dandelet all treat ideas about empire involving Naples, a place invaded successively by the Ottomans, French, and Spanish in a fifteen-year span closing the fifteenth century. This focus on Naples, never formally highlighted by the collection's editors, is helpful in fleshing out the collection's interest in the interconnection of empires and the overlap of imperial imaginaries. We see in these articles the value of a more expansive view of Mediterranean conflicts, shared rhetorical strategies among perennial rivals, and shifting notions about empire both within and across various empires.

Emily Weissbourd's chapter on John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi might also be located in a cluster of article on Neapolitan conflicts since it points out early on that Amalfi was part of the kingdom of Naples and the play is set in the moment just following the period of invasions described by Devereux. But this article is instead pushed to the second half of the volume among other pieces interested in how the development of an English imperial imaginary was "intimately bound up with the Mediterranean and its ongoing rivalries." Not surprisingly, four of these chapters are interested in English representations of Spaniards and the Spanish Empire. Setting The Duchess of Malfi alongside Lope de Vega's El mayordomo de la duqesa de...