frameworks within which any encounter is spawned and represented.
One arena in which one can see Europe’s increasingly expansionist global ambitions is in the large archive of travel narratives that were produced and transnationally disseminated in this period. For instance, working within the tradition of Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s travel collection Delle Navigationi et Viaggi (1550–1556) and other European geographers and travelers, Richard Hakluyt’s nationalist and emergent colonial promotion of England in Principal Navigations (as mentioned earlier) testifies to this link between travel writing and England’s growing commercial and imperial ambitions. Travelers provided useful knowledge that could be used to promote trading activities and political influence. Furthermore, the commercial imperatives of the new print culture gave a strong impetus to travelers to write about the new worlds, thus making “travel and travel writing mutually generative” (Fuller, 2). And it is on the sites of these “contact zones” that the political, commercial, cultural, religious, social, and aesthetic effects of Europeans’ global forays are most evident.
In her essay “‘Apes of Imitation’: Imitation and Identity in Sir Thomas Roe’s Embassy to India” (Chapter 6), Nandini Das takes us to an intriguing “contact zone” following the interactions between the Emperor Jehangir and King James’s Ambassador (and a representative of the East India Company), Sir Thomas Roe in Mughal India. She begins with the varying accounts of the wager between Roe and Jahangir about whether Roe could correctly identify a copy of an English miniature made by the Mughal court painter. Differing accounts of this episode agree on one thing, namely, that the imitative skills of the Indian artist were exemplary. The responses of Roe and his chaplain, Edward Terry, combining admiration with a certain degree of both conscious and unconscious resistance to Muslim sociocultural negotiations, highlight three issues, according to Das. One is that given the power of the Mughal empire and the English agents’ roles as supplicants, how they negotiated these encounters often led them to consider, via a “self-reflexive turn,” issues of identity and difference between the two cultures, which in turn gives us some idea about “the interactions between the home and the world, the familiar and the foreign, through which both the travelers’ experiences and their resulting texts took shape.” These cross-cultural encounters were inflected in terms of Roe’s frequently inadequate responses to Muslim social, linguistic, and cultural codes and rituals that shaped the Mughal court. Second, the large body of travel advice literature frequently reminds us that the subject of imitation was at the center of Renaissance England’s debate about travel and that imitation posed a moral threat to the gullible traveler, as evident in Ascham’s writings (also mentioned by Hadfield in Chapter 11) and in William Rankins’s tract “The English Ape.” Finally, Das’s analysis of the anxieties about travelers intersects with the literary concept of imitatio, with its emphasis on distinctions between desirable and undesirable imitation. With the extended focus of this essay on Thomas Roe’s struggle between feelings of admiration and contention, and between identity and difference while he is at the Mughal court, her essay illuminates “the fragile correspondences and seminal convergences of ‘systems of meaning’ between the two nations” in a contact zone, which invokes “co-presence, interaction, [and] interlocking understandings and practices” (Pratt, 7).
Another “contact zone,” farther east to Japan and visited by two travelers and actors from Europe, vividly comes to life in Mihoko Suzuki’s essay, “Early Modern European Encounters with Japan: Luis Frois and Engelbert Kaempfer” (Chapter 7). Frois (1532–1597), a member of the Portuguese Jesuit mission, and Kaempfer (1651–1716), the German scientist who attended the Dutch East India Company, wrote extensive accounts concerning their encounters with Japan. These proto-ethnographic accounts of Japanese society, written a century apart, reflect the different historical circumstances of the European authors and the changing contexts of the Japanese political order in the course of the seventeenth century when the Tokugawa shogunate became firmly established. The comparative analysis of the two writers suggests that Kaempfer’s differences from Frois can be fruitfully understood in terms of two theoretical paradigms: Talal Asad’s “formations of the secular” and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “provincializing Europe.” Thus, the author’s conclusions belie any fixed assumptions and expectations we may ascribe to Europeans in their representations of alterity and difference when they encountered foreigners.
It is generally a given that early modern travelers from the West were typically men, and women often faced cultural prohibitions and restrictions against venturing outside domestic spaces, as can be found in English travel guides that often functioned as admonitory tracts for potential women travelers (Akimie and Andrea 2019, 1–5). However, while the presence and voices of men dominate travel accounts and other related documents, recent scholarship has begun to recognize that women were not entirely missing in the vast apparatus of travel, commerce, cross-cultural contacts, and early colonizing activities emanating from England and Europe. In fact, Akhimie and Andrea’s coedited volume, Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World (2019), offers compelling counternarratives that “confirm that a wide range of women and girls engaged in extensive movement within and beyond the British Isles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (1). One can extrapolate on these findings to apply to European women who may have traveled in varied roles: voluntary travels as wives and dependents among elites and involuntary travel as “servants and chattel” (3–4).
An account of an exceptional woman traveler encompassing a host of identities across Europe and Asia is the subject of the next essay, by Bernadette Andrea, titled “Other Renaissances, Multiple Easts, and Eurasian Borderlands: Teresa Sampsonia Sherley’s Journey from Persia to Poland, 1608–1611” (Chapter 8). Shortly after her baptism as a Roman Catholic at the Carmelite mission in Isfahan, the capital of the Safavid Persian empire, on February 2, 1608, and her marriage to the expatriate Englishman Robert Sherley the same day, 19-year-old Teresa Sampsonia Sherley set off for what would be the first of three extended journeys across the breadth of Asia and into the heart of Europe (Robert Coverte, A True and Almost Incredible Report [London, 1612], 54). Upon her death in 1668, she was laid to rest at the Carmelite church of Santa Maria della Scala in Rome. Her epitaph – “Theresia Sampsonia Amazonitis, Sampsuffi Circassiae Principis filia” [Teresa Sampsonia, from the land of the Amazons, daughter of Sampsuff, a Circassian ruler] – celebrated her impressive lineage and indomitable spirit even as it enshrined her as an exotic acquisition for Western Christendom. Shaped by her Circassian background, Persianate education, and multiple journeys, Teresa Sampsonia’s life accordingly offers unique insights into how early modern women navigated competing religious affiliations and shared patriarchal norms across “East” and “West” as this dichotomy was mapped onto Asia and Europe and projected onto Islamdom and Christendom. In this chapter, Andrea documents a connected history of Teresa Sampsonia’s multiple contacts and crossings to ask how a seventeenth-century Circassian–Persian woman’s journey from Isfahan to Kraków illuminates and unsettles the “East–West” divide that defines “the imaginary of the [early] modern/colonial world system” (Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs, 23, and The Darker Side of the Renaissance, vii). As this chapter establishes, her travels are overdetermined by, even as they deconstruct, the imaginative geographies of Orientalism and Occidentalism.
Global travels and cross-cultural encounters continue apace in the next essay, titled “Becoming Mughal, Becoming Dom João de Távora: Friendship, Dissimulation, and Manipulation in Jesuit and Mughal Exchanges” (Chapter 9), by João Vicente Melo. English early modern studies on travel and traffic (in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) generally focus on the English travelers to the Mughal Court in India such as Thomas Roe and Edward Terry. A more complex story emerges when we consider the Portuguese presence as a rival European power at the time, with Goa as its first territorial possession and the capital of Portugal’s eastern empire. Crucial to the consolidation of the Portuguese Estado da Índia were