Book Review

Comparative/World

Molly Greene's book straddles a number of important terrains, both historiographic and geographic. It revisits longstanding debates over whether the early modern Mediterranean is best understood as a topos of cultural commonality and positive interaction or as one defined by the clash between a northern Christian front and a southern Muslim one, but it does so in a new way. Greene moves beyond the traditional matrices for theories of Mediterraneity, situating the action not in the basin's western reaches (the boundary between the Iberian peninsula and the Maghreb) but rather in the east, on the island of Crete. Methodologically, too, the approach is fresh: by using both Venetian sources and Ottoman ones, Greene is able to comment effectively on existing historiography, identifying the unintentional but unhelpful biases of studies that are strictly "Greek" or "Ottoman" or "Venetian."

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"This [eastern Mediterranean] world," Greene argues, "had a dynamic all of its own, one that is not adequately conveyed by a focus on the struggle—or absence of one—between Christianity and Islam" (p. 4). By reintroducing a third element into the analysis—in addition to Latin Christianity and Islam, Greene rightly insists that Eastern Orthodoxy be considered a vital component of the religio-cultural mix—she soundly demonstrates that "Christians" and "Muslims" cannot properly be understood as binary categories that either succeeded in their interactions or clashed with one another.

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