The Multiple Renaissances: Revival, Temporality, and Modernity across the Eastern Mediterranean, 1700-1900

Abstract

This collection of essays explores the trajectories taken by texts, individu-als and ideas across the geographic and intellectual space of the Eastern Mediterranean during the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Moving the concept of Renaissance away from its traditional chronological canonization, which corresponds to the early modern period, the volume challenges established approaches for the study of modernity in non-European regions and particularly in the Eastern Mediterranean. The title of the issue, The Multiple Renaissances , deliberately engages with the idea of renaissance-revival, here used in the plural form and intended as a mobile concept that travelled across languages, periods and places. The essays contained in the volume draw on recent studies that recast the Mediterranean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries within a complex rather than looking at it as a “site of a derivative and defensive modernity”.2 Overall, the volume show how a d’historicité , by of resurgence, religious new perceptions of temporality the Ottoman stream