Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture

The figure of 'Mahomet' was widely known in early modern England. A grotesque version of the Prophet Muhammad, Mahomet was a product of vilification, caricature and misinformation placed at the centre of Christian conceptions of Islam. In Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture Matthew Dimmock draws on an eclectic range of early modern sources - literary, historical, visual - to explore the nature and use of Mahomet in a period bounded by the beginnings of print and the early Enlightenment. This fabricated figure and his spurious biography were endlessly recycled, but also challenged and vindicated, and the tales the English told about him offer new perspectives on their sense of the world - its geographies and religions, near and far - and their place within it. This book explores the role played by Mahomet in the making of Englishness, and reflects on what this might reveal about England's present circumstances.

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'Dr Dimmock has broken new ground, not only in his excavation of neglected English sources from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but also by his close reading of a wider range of writings than has hitherto been assembled in one place … This book furnishes a detailed and vivid sense of the varied ways in which the early modern English constructed and used the person of Mahomet/Muhammad in the articulation of their own identities, world views and notions of self. As such, it provides a suggestive and instructive point of reference and of self-interrogation for any reader inclined to a historically grounded and culturally contextualized understanding of the many and often-fraught ongoing twenty-first-century Western engagements with the Prophet of Islam.' Shahab Ahmed, Harvard University

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Product details

• Date Published: July 2013
• format: Hardback
• isbn: 9781107032910
• length: 308 pages

• dimensions: 229 x 152 x 21 mm
• weight: 0.62kg
• contains: 25 b/w illus.
• availability: Available