The Not-Forgotten Empire: Images of Persia in English Renaissance Writing

This essay argues that the image of Persia is a familiar, largely positive and particularly compelling one for English Renaissance readers and writers. It surveys the range of sources of information available, and the kinds of uses to which they were put. Challenging the weight of recent scholarship on the Ottomans which presents them writ large as the representatives of the 'East' for English audiences and readers, I hope to show that the distinctiveness of Persia in the English imagination is an important counter-weight to this sense of Eastern difference predicated on conceptions of Ottoman threat.