Abstract
In thus theorizing “The Strange Effects of Ordinary Space,” Patricia Yaeger points toward a fundamental aporia in literary and cultural studies of early modern Malta: the always-already effaced indigenes of the island.1 As in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, numerous colonial and countercolonial contests striate this profoundly overdetermined locale, positioned roughly between the coast of Sicily and the coast of modern Libya (the site of early modern Tunis and ancient Carthage). In The Tempest, a similarly situated Mediterranean island stages the struggle between Prospero, the newest invader, and Caliban, the previous invader now subject to the current colonial hegemony. The indigenes of the island, however, emerge in the play as “what is hidden, encrypted, repressed, or unspoken” through Caliban’s famous paean: “Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.”2 Similarly, Maltese history from antiquity through the early modern period involves successive invasions by the Phoenicians (ninth century BC), the Carthaginians (eighth and seventh century BC), the Romans (fourth century BC to sixth century AD, with an influential landing by St. Paul in the first century and a possible occupation by the North African Vandals in the fifth century), the Byzantine Greeks (the sixth century AD), the Muslim Arabs (from AD 870, establishing the Maltese language as a cognate of Arabic), the Normans (from AD 1061), and the Aragonese (from AD 1283).
[W]hat is unrepresentable about space is not only the pressure of diverse social maps multiplying space toward infinity but the additional pressure of what is hidden, encrypted, repressed, or unspoken in global and local histories. And this repression is exacerbated by the quiddity and seeming impenetrability of created local space.
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Notes
Patricia Yaeger, “Introduction: Narrating Space,” The Geography of Identity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 1–38; epigraph p. 25; citation p. 1.
Brian Blouet in A Short History of Malta (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), 26–67. Subsequent colonists included the French and the English in 1798. The Maltese achieved national independence in 1964.
Ernle Bradford, The Great Siege (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), p. vii.
My use of the psychoanalytic model of the “imaginary,” rather than the traditional term “imagination,” references imperialist subject formation as theorized by Robert J.C. Young in Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 159–82.
Emily C. Bartels, “Capitalizing on the Jew: The Third Term in The Jew of Malta,” Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 82–108. On the subject position of the “native,” see “Ethnicity and Indigeneity,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 213–45, esp. Terry Goldie, “The Representation of the Indigene,” pp. 232–6.
Helen Vella Bonavita, “Key to Christendom: The 1565 Siege of Malta, Its Histories, and Their Uses in Reformation Polemic,” Sixteenth Century Journal 33 (2002): 1021–43; citation p. 1021.
Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols., trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), vol. 2, p. 1014.
For Christian providentialism as a response to Ottoman imperialism, see Jonathan Burton, “English Anxiety and the Muslim Power of Conversion: Five Perspectives on ‘Turning Turk’ in Early Modern Texts,” Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 2 (2002): 35–67.
Braudel, vol. 2, p. 1014, reiterates this commonplace. A.J. Arberry, in his Introduction to A Maltese Anthology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), refers to Malta as “a bastion of Western civilization” (p. xxxvii).
Samuel C. Chew, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England During the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1937), p. 123. Cf. Elizabeth I’s warning, “If the Turks should prevail against the Isle of Malta, it is uncertain what further peril might follow to the rest of Christendom” (Bradford, The Great Seige, p. vii).
The English prayers for the 1565 siege of Malta may be found in Liturgies and Occasional Forms of Prayer set forth in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, ed. W.K. Clay (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1847), pp. 519–37, citation p. 519.
Braudel, vol. 1, pp. 625–6, discusses “Anglo-Turkish negotiations, 1578–1583.” For Anglo-Moroccan diplomatic and cultural negotiations, see Jack D’Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1991).
Andrew P. Vella, An Elizabethan-Ottoman Conspiracy (Malta: Royal University of Malta, 1972), p. 5.
The Jew of Malta 1.1.36–7, in Christopher Marlowe, Complete Plays and Poems, ed. E.D. Pendry (London: J.M. Dent, 1976).
Stefan Goodwin, Malta, Mediterranean Bridge (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 2002), p. 34.
Roma Gill, Introduction in The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe. Volume IV: The Jew of Malta (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. ix.
See N.W. Bawcutt’s Introduction to The Jew of Malta (Manchester University Press, 1978), pp. 16–37, for the debate over the play’s authorship that he resolves in Marlowe’s favor. Bawcutt nevertheless presumes “the hypocrisy and double standards of Maltese society” without clarifying that the world of Marlowe’s play does not correspond to historical Malta (p. 35).
On “Mediterraneanism,” see Peregrine Horden and Nicolas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 486–8, 522–3; citation 486–7;
Jon P. Mitchell, Ambivalent Europeans: Ritual, Memory, and the Public Sphere in Malta (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. xi–xii;
and Michael Herzfeld, Anthropology through the Looking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 13–16, 64–70.
Daniel J. Vitkus, “Trafficking with the Turk: English Travelers in the Ottoman Empire During the Early Seventeenth Century,” in Travel Knowledge: European “Discoveries” in the Early Modern Period, ed. Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna G. Singh (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 35–52; citation p. 41.
On similarly fraught locales for the radical sectarians, see The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature, ed. C.A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984).
Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714 (New York: Norton, 1980), p. 9.
For a “revisionist” perspective, see Conrad Russell, “England in 1637,” Reformation to Revolution: Politics and Religion in Early Modern England, ed. Margo Todd (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 116–41.
News from the Great Turke (1645), for instance, lists among the Ottoman Sultan’s numerous honorifics, “of America” (sig. A2). While Knolles in the sixth edition of The Generall Historie of the Turkes (1687) establishes the Americas as outside the reach of Ottoman expansionism (“only America being free from him” [p. 981 ]), popular culture believed the Ottoman Empire to be global. For Ottoman interest in the Americas during the early modern period, see Bernadette Andrea, “Columbus in Istanbul: Ottoman Mappings of the ‘New World,’” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 30 (1997): 135–65.
A movement was afoot in seventeenth-century England to restore the English Knights of Malta, as detailed in D.F. Allen, “Attempts to Revive the Order of Malta in Stuart England,” The Historical Journal 33 (1990): 939–52.
Ann Jacobson Schutte proposed the model of the “Black Legend of the Inquisition” at the NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) Summer Institute, “A Literature of Their Own?: Women Writing—Venice, London, Paris—1500–1700” (directed by Albert Rabil at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in July 2001). For Schutte’s further explorations of this model, see his Aspiring Saints: Pretense of Holiness, Inquisition, and Gender in the Republic of Venice, 1618–1750 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Also note the discussion of the Maltese Inquisition, originally an offshoot of the Spanish Inquisition in Sicily and subsequently comprehended under the Roman Inquisition in 1574, in Charles Henry Lea, The Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies (London: Macmillan, 1908; 1922), pp. 44–7,
and in Andrew P. Vella, The Tribunal of the Inquisition in Malta (Royal University of Malta, 1964). Lea mentions Evans and Chevers’s encounter with the Maltese Inquisition on p. 47; Vella provides a more thorough analysis of their case using the trial records of the Inquisition, pp. 30–7, balancing Evans and Chevers’s inevitably one-sided account.
Michel de Certeau, “Spatial Practices,” The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 91–130.
C.V. Wedgwood, “The Conversion of Malta,” Velvet Studies (London: Jonathan Cape, 1946), p. 130.
For the imperialist implications of this response, see Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), p. 30.
Kenneth L. Carroll mentions Baker in “Quaker Captives in Morocco, 1685–1701,” The Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society 55 (1983): 67–79.
As Phyllis Mack notes in Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), the prophetic voice of first generation Quaker women such as Evans and Chevers recalls that of “the aggressive, male Old Testament hero” rather than the subdued “mother in Israel” of the second generation (pp. 127–64).
The most tolerant pronouncement in the entire narrative was voiced by the brother of the Grand Master of Malta, who was on the outbound ship of Evans and Chevers: “he spake to the Captain often that we might not want any thing that was in the Ship, and he told us: if we were at Malta again we should not be persecuted so; for as soon as he saw our faces he said, he would not differ with u.r, he and some other of them said to the Captain, If we went to Heaven one way, and they another, yet we should all meet together at the last.” To this broad tolerance, Evans and Chevers retorted, “But we held out Christ Jesus the Light of the World, to be the alone way to the Father” (p. 255). At Tangiers, Evans and Chevers strove to convert “the Moors their Enemies” (p. 259), but were prevented from doing so by the Governor of the besieged fort. For a description of this strained colonial outpost, see E.M.G. Routh, “The English at Tangier,” The English Historical Review 26 (1911): 469–81.
See William C. Braithwaite, The Second Period of Quakerism (Cambridge University Press, 1961), companion volume to The Beginnings of Quakerism, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1961). For the intensifying patriarchalism of this period, see Mack, Visionary Women, pp. 265–304.
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© 2007 Goran V. Stanivukovic
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Andrea, B. (2007). From Invasion to Inquisition: Mapping Malta in Early Modern England. In: Stanivukovic, G.V. (eds) Remapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230601840_14
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