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Age of Hadice Turhan Sultan, Women and Gender in the Early Modern World (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate Ltd 2007), 346 Pp., £60.00, ISBN 978 0 754 63310 5

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Age of Hadice Turhan Sultan, Women and Gender in the Early Modern World (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate Ltd 2007), 346 Pp., £60.00, ISBN 978 0 754 63310 5 452 Book Reviews / Journal of Early Modern History 12 (2008) 443-466 Th ys-Senoçak, Lucienne, Ottoman Women Builders. Th e Architectural Patron- age of Hadice Turhan Sultan, Women and Gender in the Early Modern World (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate Ltd 2007), 346 pp., £60.00, ISBN 978 0 754 63310 5. Ottoman royal women and the manner in which they could express them- selves and confirm their own and their family’s political and religious leg- acy through architectural patronage, is a fairly new area of interest within the field of Ottoman studies that has recently been touched upon by schol- ars such as Amy Singer, Leslie Pierce and Fairchild Ruggles. Th e work of Lucienne Th ys-Senoçak on the architectural patronage of Hadice Turhan Sultan contributes to this field with a multidisciplinary approach, illus- trated by several original documents, transcriptions, translations, drawings and historical photographs, many of which are published for the first time in this work. Th e introduction is a clearly written overview of how and why the author has made use of the broad variety of approaches in her work. It is followed by a chapter that describes Turhan Sultan’s life, rising from an anonymous concubine to become valide sultan (the sultan’s mother), based on the information available in both Ottoman and European archival material and chronicles. Th is portrait is well complemented by compari- sons between the strategies for patronage and visibility used to obtain political and religious legacy by Turhan Sultan and those of other women in a similar position. Here, the author refers not only to her predecessors (Hasseki Hürrem, Mirimah, Safiye and Kösem Sultan) but also to European royal women such as Catharine and Maria de Medici and Elizabeth I. She points out the contacts established between the European royal women and the Ottoman royal women and discusses whether they may have influenced each other. Some similarities can be noticed, such as the use of historicising or religious themes (early Christian or Muslim “Matrons”), but the author sees and emphasises a crucial difference in the European female patrons’ ability to use their own body to express power and legacy through portraits or sculpture. After this historical background, the author analyses Turhan Sultan’s restoration of the Kumkale and Seddülbahir fortresses in the Dardanelles. Th rough the study of a great variety of written and material evidence the author illustrates how Turhan Sultan with these fortresses expressed a link- age both with Mehmed II (their founder) and with significant female patrons of military architecture in early Islam, such as Zubayda, a wife of © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 DOI: 10.1163/157006508X400149 Book Reviews / Journal of Early Modern History 12 (2008) 443-466 453 Harun al-Rashid. She also refers to the gender segregated situation in Europe at this time, where the reconstruction of a fortress would have been an impossible action for a woman. Th e author also describes the architec- tural development of both fortresses from Turhan Sultan’s restoration until World War I, using different kinds of source material and archaeological evidence. In the following chapter the author provides a description and interpre- tation of the Yeni Valide complex in Eminönü and its architectural and epigraphic iconography that uses both Islamic law and the inscriptions of the building to give emphasis to her (and her son’s) legacy and righteous- ness as rulers. Th e conclusion shows how architecture, agency and self representation are integral parts of these buildings. It also shows, despite a generally accepted, negative perception of the 17th-century valide sultans’ political role, how well Turhan Sultan ruled the Ottoman Empire for three decades on behalf of her son, who, as soon as she was gone, proved to be incapable of holding the empire together himself. Even though the intended readership of this book may be the scholar of Ottoman or Islamic studies, it is of great potential interest to historians or architectural historians specialised on Europe as well as to a broader pub- lic. It demonstrates the rich possibilities of undertaking Ottoman histori- cal research and confirms it’s place in the wide discipline of history. For the researcher it opens up a great variety of inclusive and inventive methodo- logical options, while for the lecturer or student it shows the different types of information needed for any study of Ottoman building history. Fur- thermore, the author provides the reader with several examples of case studies: Ottoman Imperial court history, the crossover between gender and architectural patronage, architecture patronage and self representation, Ottoman and European female patronage, methodology of Ottoman building archaeology seen through both written and material sources. Th e author also supplies the reader with some of the tools she has had access to: the reproduction and sometimes both transliteration and translation of the rich and diverse archival material, poetry and Koranic verses, archaeologi- cal illustrations and historical photographs. One methodological difficulty of the inclusive character of this work is that the variety of sources sometimes makes the line of thought difficult to follow, especially in the two chapters dealing with the building projects. Moreover, this reviewer would like to challenge the author’s argument that Ottoman or Muslim women used architecture as a means of expressing .
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