Dress and the Contested Body in Early Modern Travel Writing

• In Event: Negotiating the Levant

Abstract

This paper examines the writings of early modern travelers to the Levant to investigate how dress codes shaped European Christians’ encounters with the Holy Land and its peoples. First, it looks at how ideas about gendered dress affected travelers’ relationships with both Muslim and Christian inhabitants of the Levant. Second, it examines how Westerners adopting “Turkish” attire moved through the contested spaces of the Holy Land and how these movements were further complicated by the fear of forced conversion. Third, it looks at how reforms at home changed how Europeans abroad claimed the protected status of pilgrims, examining the ways in which the marking of confessional identity through dress affected their travels. This paper argues that early modern travelers revealed and attempted to overcome anxieties about their possibly slippery identities in a foreign land through the ways in which they imagined their bodies and the materials that their bodies wore.

Author

• Emily Price, University of Michigan