Roxolana in European Literature History and Culture

This collection is the first book-length scholarly study of the pervasiveness and significance of Roxolana in the European imagination. Roxolana or Hurrem Sultan was a sixteenth-century Ukrainian woman who made an unprecedented career from harem slave and concubine to legal wife and advisor of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-1566). Her influence on Ottoman affairs generated legends in many a European country. The essays gathered here represent an interdisciplinary survey of her legacy; the contributors view Roxolana as a transnational figure that reflected the shifting European attitudes towards the Other and they investigate her image in a wide variety of sources ranging from early modern historical chronicles dramas and travel writings to twentieth-century historical novels and plays. Also included are six European source texts featuring Roxolana here translated into modern English for the first time. Importantly this collection examines Roxolana from both Western and Eastern European perspectives; source material is taken from England Italy France Spain Germany Turkey Poland and Ukraine. The volume is an important contribution to the study of early modern transnationalism cross-cultural exchange and notions of identity the Self and the Other.