Twelfth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

This paper examines a neglected episode in the life of Teresa Sampsonia Sherley, a seventeenth-century Circassian woman from the Safavid court who travelled across Eurasia with her husband, the “English Persian” Robert Sherley, who was the shah’s ambassador to the Christian rulers in Europe. The three years she spent in Cracow, while her husband continued on his journey through the Holy Roman Empire, Italy, and Spain, offers unique insights on early modern women’s complex navigations of gendered ethnic and religious strictures. In 1611, Teresa Sampsonia reunited with her husband in Lisbon, having travelled through Hamburg, and together they travelled through Spain, departing from Bayonne in France for England. They remained in England for two years, returning to Iran in 1613. She thus epitomizes the “chameleon,” “cosmopolitan,” and “renegade” that Sanjay Subrahmanyam theorizes in Three Ways to Be Alien: Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World, even though he neglects to mention her in his analysis of Robert’s elder brother, Anthony, who was also the shah’s erstwhile ambassador. Her time in Cracow, in particular, complicates the dichotomy between East and West as it was mapped onto Islamic and Christian polities, as Poland (like Russia, which the Sherley party also passed through) oscillated between these geopolitical designations. This paper investigates the shifting connotations of these terms, and their political import, establishing Teresa Sampsonia’s travels from multiples “Easts”—Persia and then Poland—and onto Western Europe as a notable, albeit neglected, instance of cultural hybridization in the early modern period.