LRS: Anglican Global Crossings and the Specters of Islam in the Early Modern Period

London Renaissance Seminar Summer Lecture 13 July 2015
5.30pm, Room 112, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1

Wine will be served.  All welcome. Any queries please contact s.wiseman@bbk.ac.uk

We welcome Professor Jyotsna Singh to deliver the London Renaissance Summer Lecture, and to be London Renaissance Summer Fellow. Do join us for the lecture which inaugurates her fellowship:

Anglican Global Crossings and the Specters of Islam in the Early Modern Period

This paper offers a comparative re-examination of the narratives of two Anglican Ministers, interested in travel writing — Samuel Purchas( 1555-1626), and Edward Terry (1519-1660). I focus on how both offer complicated mediations of Islam, bringing to life the global crossings and identity formations of both Christians and Muslims. Terry spent three years in India, 1616-19, as the Chaplain for Sir Thomas Roe, Ambassador to the Mughal Court of the Emperor Jahangir and emissary of the East India Company. His detailed journal, A Voyage to East India (1625 and 1655) contains an important discussion of Indian religions, most notably of the differences between Hindus and “Mahometans.” It is telling that Terry’s journal was published by Samuel Purchas in his huge anthology of travel writings, Purchas, his Pilgrimage or Relations of the World and the Religions Observed … (1614) and in, another edition, Purchas, His Pilgrimes (1625), both of which focus on Islam in Book III. How do Islam and Christianity emerge in these Anglican accounts? While both Anglicans rejected Islam, viewing "religion" as synonymous to Christian truth, they also interpreted Islam with some complexity and ambiguity, notable in their efforts to categorize new ethnographic knowledge about the Muslim world. Finally, the discourse of “religion” that emerges in these Anglican accounts serves as an important context for understanding other Christian engagements with Islam in India and elsewhere, including those of other English Chaplains, Jesuits, and Dutch religious personages.

Jyotsna G. Singh, Professor Department of English, Michigan State University.

The London Renaissance Seminar meets at Birkbeck to discuss topics in the culture of the Renaissance. Anyone with an interest in the Renaissance is welcome to attend. Seminars are usually held in the School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square.

London Renaissance Seminar contact : s.wiseman@bbk.ac.uk
London Renaissance Seminar mailing list : t.f.healy@sussex.ac.uk

London Renaissance Seminar Summer Programme

London Renaissance Seminar Summer Programme

Summer Lecture given by Professor Jyotsna Singh
Anglican Global Crossings and the Specters of Islam in the Early Modern Period
13 July 2015 5.30pm, Room 112, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1
Wine will be served.

The Performance and Experience of Domestic Service
Organiser: Dr. Emma Whipday
Saturday 18th July 2015, 2pm-6.30pm
Room 538, Birkbeck, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HX

The Performance and Experience of Domestic Service

(London Renaissance Seminar)

In early modern England, domestic conduct literature, legal treatises, and state-sanctioned homilies propagated the ideal of the home as a self-contained system of government; the loyalty of domestic servants was therefore of political significance. Performances of domestic service onstage explored early modern anxieties and fantasies concerning the interference, surveillance, and potential insubordination of the early modern servant, and the conflicts of loyalty and illicit knowledge that domestic service entailed. This half-day symposium brings together historians, literary scholars, and actors to explore the relationship between the experience of servants in early modern England, and the representation of servants onstage. Talks will be illustrated by performances of depositions from church court records and scenes from plays.

2pm Welcome

2.05pm Laura Gowing (King’s College London), ‘Performing Service: Stories from the London Church Courts’ (with performances of depositions)

3.10pm Coffee break

3.25pm Catherine Richardson (Kent), ‘Work and Leisure: Domestic Behaviour and the Quotidian Spaces of Service’ (with performances of depositions)

4.30pm Performances of scenes from domestic tragedies

4.45pm Drinks

5pm Roundtable discussion, with all speakers and actors

5.45pm Final remarks

This event is organised by Emma Whipday (Oxford); please email emma.whipday@magd.ox.ac.uk with any queries.



The London Renaissance Seminar meets at Birkbeck, University of London to discuss topics in the culture of the Renaissance. Anyone with an interest in the Renaissance is welcome to attend. London Renaissance Seminar contact s.wiseman@bbk.ac.uk; mailing list contact: t.f.healy@sussex.ac.uk


All welcome. Any queries please contact s.wiseman@bbk.ac.uk