Review: Bisaha's Creating East and West (Renaissance & Ottomans)
This paper reviews Nancy Bisaha's Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (2004), evaluating both its strengths and limitations. The review argues that Bisaha makes a groundbreaking contribution by tracing the origins of the East-West, civilization-versus-barbarism dichotomy to the Renaissance rather than to the colonial era, with the fall of Constantinople in 1453 serving as a pivotal turning point. At the same time, the review contends that Bisaha's work falls short by not more substantively connecting its historical findings to contemporary political events — particularly post-9/11 American interventions in the Middle East — a connection the reviewer considers self-evident and analytically important.
- Overview and Central Argument: Book praised as groundbreaking yet frustratingly limited
- Structure and Historical Progression: Four chapters trace medieval to Renaissance thought
- The Fall of Constantinople and the Civilization–Barbarism Shift: 1453 reframes East-West divide around civilization
- Religion, Rhetoric, and the Ottoman 'Barbarian': Fear of Ottomans extended to all Muslims
- Bisaha's Goals and Edward Said's Orientalism: Bisaha implicitly challenges Said's colonial origin thesis
- Critical Reception and the Book's Limitations: Reviewers praise evidence but miss contemporary gap
- Conclusion: Book strong but misses urgent contemporary connections
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What makes this paper effective
- The review balances genuine praise for Bisaha's originality with a clearly reasoned critique, avoiding the common student pitfall of either uncritical summary or vague dismissal.
- It uses a specific quoted syllogism from the book — about Turks, Muslims, and barbarism — and then updates its terms to make a sharp point about contemporary relevance, demonstrating close reading in service of a larger argument.
- The paper situates Bisaha's work within a broader scholarly conversation by referencing Edward Said's concept of Orientalism, showing awareness of the field beyond the single text under review.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper effectively employs evaluative synthesis: it does not merely summarize Bisaha chapter by chapter but instead identifies a central gap — the absence of sustained engagement with contemporary events — and uses that gap as the organizing principle of the critique. This technique allows the reviewer to engage both the book's internal logic and its broader scholarly stakes simultaneously.
Structure breakdown
The review opens with a thesis that names both the book's strength and its limitation, then walks through the book's chapter structure to validate the praise before pivoting to the critique. A discussion of critical reception from published reviewers provides external support, and the conclusion restates the central argument by imagining what a more ambitious version of the book might have achieved.
Overview and Central Argument
Nancy Bisaha's book Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks is at once groundbreaking and, unfortunately, limited. It is groundbreaking because it pushes back the development of European views regarding the Ottoman Empire — and non-Western peoples more generally — to the age of the Renaissance, rather than to the age of colonialism and imperialism. By highlighting how the Renaissance saw a shift from a medieval concept of religious opposition between East and West to a post-medieval dichotomy of civilization versus barbarism, the book draws a direct line between the Renaissance humanists and the later Europeans who would adopt ideas like the "White Man's Burden" to legitimize their colonial activities.
However, the book also feels woefully limited. Although it does an effective job of recentering the development of the East-West, barbarism-civilization dichotomy in the Renaissance, it fails to effectively relate this development to contemporary issues, aside from some brief mentions of the September 11, 2001 attacks aimed against American empire in the Middle East. While it is not necessarily Bisaha's responsibility to tie all of her conclusions to a contemporary issue, the fact that her subject matter is so immediately relevant leaves the reader wishing for a more thorough account of how Renaissance ideas led to the current historical situation.
Structure and Historical Progression
Creating East and West is divided into four chapters and an epilogue, using these divisions to advance its argument through history. The first chapter addresses the lingering influences of medieval thought on the Renaissance, and particularly the legacy of Charlemagne. The second chapter covers the actual shift in thought and rhetoric that occurred in medieval conceptions of the East-West dichotomy, largely as a result of the fall of Constantinople. In particular, Bisaha notes how the loss of Constantinople represented a serious psychological blow to European humanists of the fifteenth century, because the city had secured such a special place in the rhetoric of Europe "as a barrier between Europe and the Infidel."
Bibliography
Bisaha, Nancy. Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
Dursteler, Eric. "Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks." Renaissance Quarterly 58, no. 3 (2005): 904–906.
Urban, W.L. "Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks." Choice 42, no. 9 (2005): 1644.
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