The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (review)

It is a fertile time for serious research and studies on pleasure, gender, and sexuality in the Middle East both in historical and contemporary contexts. They are fields that have long been ignored, overlooked, or even suppressed by scholars except for some scanty works produced here and there, but there are now finally in-depth analytical works, often with comparative perspectives and constructed in the light of contemporary theories, as is the case in the works by Brian Whitaker, Dror Zeevi, and so on. With a similar yet more comprehensive outlook, The Age of Beloveds by Walter Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı is perhaps one of the first works systematically analyzing sex, gender, and pleasure in Ottoman society as they are represented in literature—including poetry and prose such as biographies, histories, and memoirs—produced during the early Ottoman era, beginning with the start of Ottoman rule in Constantinople and continuing to the early seventeenth century. In analyzing the period in question this work puts forward three underlining theses: first, that the homoerotic, both chaste and sexual, was the dominant component of male pleasure and viewed as normal; second, that the court and courtly lifestyle were central to this culture of male pleasure, supporting it directly or indirectly as a leading institution; and third, that most of Renaissance Europe showed similar attributes, and thus the Ottoman court and its literary culture were more in parallel with Europe than with Persian literary culture, which, according to the authors, has been wrongly believed to be the main source of inspiration for Ottoman literature. With all these demarcations the authors aim at initiating a new "look at the Ottomans from a new perspective" (9).

The authors try every effort to prove their theses not only through strategies of close readings of the literary texts but also by showing extensive historical evidence indicating how important sexuality was to the power game in and around the court. However, as the authors themselves indicate, it is sometimes very difficult to reach clear-cut understandings and historically compatible conclusions, as the bulk of the analyzed texts are poetic in nature, set in a wide range of contexts, and show various interactions between the poet, his speakers, and his subjects. Accordingly, their wider significance in relation to the court culture is difficult to determine precisely. Among the difficulties, the androgynous nature of Ottoman poetic language makes the gender of the subject overwhelmingly blurry, leaving much room for free interpretation.

The book consists of eleven chapters. In chapter 1 the authors pose methodological questions concerning the nature of the subject, indicating at every opportunity the risks of misinterpreting the texts, which results in misunderstandings. To exemplify this point they offer a possible rereading or "fictionalizing" of the story of Sultan Mehmet II (the Ottoman conqueror of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire) and the fourteen-year-old son of a Greek official named Lukas Notaras in order to show how historical texts are filled with traps and how one needs to read them with extreme caution. The authors also show that love and sexual acts were mostly unrecorded, and, other than in a very scanty number of documents, it is hard to find strong evidence for these private affairs in the Ottoman era. In this chapter the authors also talk about general theories and approaches in the study of sexuality in modern times, mentioning the seminal works in the field by Michel Foucault, Eva Keuls, David Halperin, and others and demonstrating how modern terms and concepts of sexuality obscure the historical complexity of sexual orientations. The authors also mention how the young or adolescent man became the focal point of erotic desire in this period in both Europe and the Ottoman realm. Certain problems and shortcomings in traditional Ottoman historiography in understanding desire...