Lady Mary Wortley Montague contributed to microbiology and immunology by virtue of her powers of observation and her passion for letter writing. As the wife of the British Ambassador Extraordinary to the Turkish court, Montague and her family lived in...

Well known throughout polite society for her wit and verse, English world traveller Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) also worked to introduce the practice of inoculation against smallpox to the medical establishment of eighteenth-century Britain,...

1689-1762 English writer who introduced smallpox inoculations to England. Born into nobility, Montagu grew up surrounded by influential people. She suffered smallpox, which scarred her face. Montagu later traveled with her husband Edward, an...

Montagu is celebrated as a consummate writer of intelligent, witty, and frequently scandalous letters. Spanning the years 1708 to 1762, Montagu's correspondence is addressed to a wide variety of recipients and is considered remarkable for its...

The Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (born 26 May 1689 in Thoresby Hall, died 21 August 1762), was an English aristocrat and writer, chiefly remembered today for her...

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's intimacy with her subject and audience is characterized in her epistles written from 1721 to 1727. She modulated her diction and maintained a minimum number of details about her subject. Readers in the 1990s experience a feeling of intrusion since...

THE YEAR 1718 MARKS a significant point in the history of the Ottoman Empire, demarcating the first spate of Westernization reforms--the so-called Tulip Period (1718-1730)--which sought to strengthen the Ottoman Empire after its defeat in Vienna at the end of the seventeenth century....

In this essay, Lowenthal argues that in her letters concerning the English social elite Montagu “attempts to work through [the competing demands of class and gender … and to emphasize the impossibility of separating private from public behavior.”]

In the essay below, Aravamudan examines the implications of the “levantinization” or “transformation of identity that occurs when an individual from one culture is psychically and physiologically absorbed into another” that Montagu demonstrates in the Turkish Embassy Letters.

In this essay, Desai surveys the biographical background to the writing of the Turkish Embassy Letters, the circumstances of their publication, and the reception they received.