ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that in her letters to friends and family members, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu weighs the values of Muslim and Christian customs. In one brief passage, Montagu establishes her English Protestant (Whig) framework for judging beauty and, in turn, a method for establishing cultural value. British foreign policy during Montagu’s time, overlapped with its domestic policy; the ruling Protestants sought to control Catholics in Great Britain and on the continent. Montagu privileges the English theaters over the Viennese and, in turn, she grants a particular cultural sovereignty to England, reaffirming Protestant English cultural superiority in the realms of the arts and humanities over those of continental Catholic nations. Considering that Montagu organized the Turkish Embassy Letters after her return from the Ottoman Empire and that she ordered them published only after her death further suggests she intended a sociopolitical message for her eighteenth-century readers.
