Changing Perceptions of Middle Eastern Objects and Cultures in Eighteenth-Century Europe

In this article, I shall discuss the changing perceptions of particular objects, the advances in scholarship that may produce such changes, and whether any such developments in scholarship can be attributable to Enlightenment thought. In post-Renaissance Europe, we witness a gradual recalibration of attitudes to the Islamic world and its culture. This is partially driven by trade and taste, as well as politics, but is also the result of scholarly advances that allow various Islamic artefacts held in European collections to come into sharper focus. As their inscriptions are read and their origins are better understood, their agency changes and new perceptions are formed of them: they become part of a new awareness of Islamic culture, set in the context of the altered dynamic of European engagement with a steadily less threatening Ottoman Empire.¹