Book Review: Suraiya Faroqhi, The Ottoman and Mughal Empires: Social History in the Early Modern World

Abstract

modern historiography (‘a rather recent historiographical fiction’ (p. 158), as it is styled here), as well as a dominant trope in the modern historical record, but this separation was an affective manoeuvre, a valorisation of a politics of masculinity conceived narrowly, to serve political interests conceived equally narrowly. It is an idea that still has political currency (see the unsupportable reason-boosting of Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, for example). This has not only misrepresented medieval life by implication but modern life too, and it is in this observation that the real importance of works such as Boquet and Nagy’s becomes clear. Here, the ‘evolution of scholarly thought towards a natural philosophy of the emotions’, of the human as an ‘emotive creature endowed with reason’ began in the twelfth century (p. 135), with a ‘science of emotion’ in place by the end of the 13th. Human beings are deeply complex creatures, deeply subject to change over time, at the level of the body, the brain, and of culture. There is nothing more complex about modern human beings or their ideas than about medieval human beings, and explaining what differences there are over time, in feeling, in expression, in bodily and affective practices, in epistemology, cannot be carried out through the mode of increasing complication. Beautifully rich and elegant as a work of medieval history, this work should also prompt modernists to check their assumptions and their starting points. Truly foundational, Medieval Sensibilities is an ideal introduction for those who wish to embrace ‘the infinite cultural malleability of the strange, affective material from which we are made’ (p. 248).