SOURCE: “Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the Hammam: Masquerade, Womanliness, and Levantinization,” in ELH, Vol. 62, No. 1, Spring 1995, pp. 69-104.

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.

Forth rush the Levant and the Ponent Windes. 

—Milton, Paradise Lost (10.704)

Based on a journey to the Ottoman Empire undertaken during the years 1716-18, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's travel letters were first published in their entirety in 1763. The author had died the previous year. Montagu's stay at Constantinople with her husband Edward Wortley who had been appointed Ambassador to the Subline Porte, provides the central focus of the travel letters. But as her reflections range widely across the culture and geography of the Eastern Mediterranean, a more inclusive title seems appropriate...