Through the Eyes of the Beholder ─ The Holy Land, 1517-1713

The collection examines the view of holiness in the Holy Land through the writings of pilgrims, travelers, and missionaries. The period extends from 1517, the Ottoman conquest of Syria and Palestine, to the Franco-British treaty of Utrecht in 1713 and the consolidation of European hegemony over the Mediterranean. The writers in the collection include Christians (Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholic), Muslims, and Jews, who originate from countries such as Sweden, England, France, Holland, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Syria. This book is the first to juxtapose writers of different backgrounds and languages, to emphasize the holiness of the land in a number of traditions, and to ask whether holiness was inherent in geography or a product of the piety of the writers. Contributors are: Mohammad Asfour, Hasan Baktir, Richard Coyle, Judy A. Hayden, Nabil I. Matar, Joachim stlund, Michael Rotenberg-Schwartz, Julia Schleck, Mazin Tadros and Galina Yermolenko.

Judy A. Hayden, Ph.D. (2000), Professor of English at the University of Tampa, writes on the English seventeenth-century. She has recently published Of Love and War: The Political Voice in the Early Plays of Aphra Behn (Rodopi, 2010) and edited two collections on the intersection of science and literary discourse.Nabil I. Matar. Ph.D. (1976), University of Cambridge, is Presidential Professor in the English Department at the University of Minnesota. He has published a trilogy on Islam and Britain in the early modern period, and his next publication is an annotated edition of a treatise by Henry Stubbe (Columbia UP, 2012).