The Rise of Oriental Travel by Gerald MacLean (review)

69 There are a fair number of oversights and errors. The entry on No. 799 is mentioned in the ‘‘Contributors and Authors’’ section under Colley Cibber, noting ‘‘on the dispute between Colley Cibber and Alexander Pope, a fair and balanced commentary,’’ but this number is not among those listed under Pope. No. 44 transcribes sixteen lines of William Broome’s paraphrase ‘‘Part of the 38th and 39th Chapters of Job,’’ attributing them to ‘‘Mr. Brome.’’ Mr. Pitcher types this up as referring to ‘‘Brome, Alexander ,’’ an identification that a quick search in The Eighteenth Century Online Collection (ECCO) would have corrected (it is from Poems on Several Occasions , 1727). The sole contributor entry for Young is to No. 44, but elsewhere Mr. Pitcher notes other long quotations from Young, such as in Nos. 105 and 107. The anthologized poetry required a much greater effort from Mr. Pitcher. Half the poems published were not found listed in the contents summary or the poetry list, such as John Byrom’s ‘‘Epilogue to Hurlothrumbo’’ (No. 26), ‘‘To Chloe in the Country’’(No. 57), Leonard Eusden’s ‘‘Ode for the Birth-day, 1729’’ (No. 56), ‘‘To a Lady who lov’d Dancing ’’ (No. 73), or ‘‘An Elegy on Jemmy Spiller’’ (No. 20); and some like the last are noteworthy, for they were frequently later anthologized. ‘‘The Merry Monarch ; or, Knighthood a Jest’’(No. 201) is mentioned in the summary but not in the list of poems. The poetry listing for ‘‘Blouzibel, A Song’’ is ‘‘[Jasper Crambo ]—No. 39,’’ which wrongly suggests that Crambo, who signed the epistolary puff preceding the poem, was the author of that often reprinted poem. Despite the space allotted to contents, the entries do not offer impressive coverage. For instance , two letters in No. 61 appended to an essay said to lament effeminacy of young men have no special notation on content (both concern excessive powdering of wigs). We are not given any kind of index on the subjects discussed, as ‘‘courtship and marriage: nos. 7, 22, 37,’’ or ‘‘education: nos. 23, 50.’’ Transcribing the initial words of each article and story in an alphabetical order seems an unproductive expense given the resources of ECCO. Paper and ink had been better spent on a list of mottos and a first-line index to poetry (then an unlisted poem like ‘‘Mr. C. H. to Dr. L—’’ in No. 10 might be identified as that often reproduced as ‘‘An Epistolary Letter from J. H. to Sir Hans Sloan’’). James E. May Penn State University— DuBois GERALD MACLEAN. The Rise of Oriental Travel. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Pp. xxi ⫹ 267. $65. Othello was called from his marriage bed to fight the Turks, typically the cruel enemy in belles lettres. Mr. MacLean finds another truth in the nuanced travel accounts of the Ottoman Empire from the early-modern period. The Turks were far less barbarous than the seventeenthand eighteenth-century stereotypes of them. He plucks from obscurity four travel writers and provides cultural reconstructions of attitudes toward non-Christian foreigners. The four travel accounts are 1) Thomas Dallam’s MS of travels (1599–1600); 2) William Biddulph’s Travels of certaine Englishmen into Africa , Asia, Troy, etc. (1609); 3) Henry Blount’s Voyage into the Levant (1636); and 4) The Adventure of (Mr. T. S.) an English Merchant, Taken Prisoner by the Turks of Argiers [sic] (1670). A few other travelers and Orientalists are men- 70 tioned, notably Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Paul Rycaut, George Sandys, Thomas Smith, Richard Knolles, and others. But many travel books that have a much larger presence in EnglishMiddle East history, such as John Chardin ’s Travels in Persia and the East (1686), Jean Thevenot’s Travels into the Levant (1687) (both of these read by Lady Mary while preparing for her sojourn in Turkey), and Aaron Hill’s notorious Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1709), go untreated. His arbitrary selection ‘‘retell[s] these journeys.’’ He has produced a partly scholarly monograph with extensive bibliography , with a personal memoir of his own impressions guided by these four seventeenth-century accounts. (One chapter relates the life of an early female visitor , Anne Lady Glover, the ambassador ’s wife...