This collection brings together thirteen new essays that examine England’s fascination with, and fantasies about, the Mediterranean in the early modern period. The essays in this volume
employ the Mediterranean both as a physical and cultural space, and as an idea that challenges boundaries between the East and the West. It does so by emphasizing the Ottoman Mediterranean
and by exploring a variety of literary and non-literary texts produced between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The Afterword, written by an Ottomanist, engages in a dialogue with
literary scholars and offers new pathways in the study of the Mediterranean, especially its eastern part.
