News from the East

Abstract:The first dateable English printed document is an indulgence to raise money against the Turks. In this essay I take this indulgence, printed by William Caxton at Westminster in 1476, as a starting-point for a reconsideration of fifteenth-century English literary and cultural representations of Rhodes and the advancing Ottoman Turks. The 1480 siege of the Hospitaller island of Rhodes was a turning-point in the production and dissemination of writing about the Turkish conquests. John Kay's Siege of Rhodes, printed c. 1482, reflects the interest in current affairs both at Edward IV's court and at the humanist Italian courts where Kay, Edward's self-described laureate, had spent time. I then introduce a letter from John Paston, describing a Turk in his household, and the fifteenth-century poem The Turke and Sir Gawain, to consider how the Turkish male body was represented. I argue that representations of the Turk in later fifteenth-century England reveal admiration, fear, and a sense of proximity and similarity. Such representations show how the Turk was frequently discussed in cultural discourse, and inaugurate the "Turk" as a discursive representation in the English imagination. The recent turn to the "Global Middle Ages" in medieval English studies has not yet fully attended to the specifics of interactions between Latin Christendom and the Ottoman Turks. This requires an acknowledgment of the importance in later fifteenth-century England of mediated news reports concerning the growing Ottoman empire and the parlous state of Christian lands in the eastern Mediterranean.