The Turk of Early Modern France: Introduction

The most pervasive oriental figure in early modern French art and letters, the Turk undergoes a significant transformation from the sixteenth to the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. While two of his main features, violence and lasciviousness, and a general ambivalence toward the Turk persist throughout this period, a deeply-rooted fear of the Ottomans during the Renaissance gradually yields to a desire to contain and domesticate them in the classical age. The Turk of early modern France emerges as both stable and flexible, predictable and unique, one and many. As a fiction in flux, he also allows for a renewed critical engagement with Orientalism as a "system of thought" (Said).