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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2021

Patterning the Tatar Girl in George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesie (1589)

Résumé

This chapter purports be a follow-up on Bernadette Andrea’s past and present investigations on the refracted literary presences of displaced girls and women from Islamic lands in early modern English texts, in a context which is one of globalized human and commodity traffics and turnings. The chapter takes as its starting point one such possibility of refracted presence for the person of the Tartar girl offered to Elizabeth I by Anthony Jenkinson, an agent of the Muscovy company engaged in the circuit of textile trade with the East. I first show how the Tatar’s girl’s presence and her connections to the textile trade networks can be inferred from the fictional oriental origin attributed by George Puttenham to pattern poetry in The Art of English Poesie (1589), a volume offered to the Queen in an act of self-promotion, just as the Tatar girl herself had been offered to her with a similar promotional agenda by the Muscovy Company. I explore how the Tatar and textile associations are reflected both in the shapes retained for Puttenham’s visual poems (including spindles) and the textile-connected puns implied in the nomenclature and origins chosen for his Tatar and Persian speakers. I move on to study how fusing an actually ancient literary form from the West with very contemporary and global concerns allow Puttenham to map an emerging global discourse of trade and conquest onto bodies that are both the ornate ones of his poems and the transcultural ones of the ladies he stages. I conclude that Puttenham’s literary composites invite us to take stock of the social lives of artistic forms and their accumulated meanings in a period in which culture was at times as globally intervowen as the patterns on the rich textiles that were traded internationally.
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Dates et versions

hal-04002287 , version 1 (23-02-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04002287 , version 1

Citer

Ladan Niayesh. Patterning the Tatar Girl in George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesie (1589). A Companion to the Global Renaissance, 2021, 978-1-119-62626-8. ⟨hal-04002287⟩
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