Persian Mirror
Subtitle: Reflections of the Safavid Empire in Early Modern France
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2020
Language: eng
Number of pages: 240
ISBN-13: 9780190884796
Subjects: Travelers' writings, history and criticism; Visits of state; France, ethnic relations; Iran, foreign relations; Iran, history; France, history, bourbons, 1589-1789
Description: The Persian Mirror explores France's preoccupation with Persia in the seventeenth century. Long before Montesquieu's Persian Letters, French intellectuals, diplomats and even ordinary Parisians were fascinated by Persia and eagerly consumed travel accounts, fairy tales, and the spectacle the Persian ambassador's visit to Paris and Versailles in 1715. Using diplomatic sources, fiction and printed and painted images, The Persian Mirror describes how the French came to see themselves in Safavid Persia. In doing so, it revises our notions of orientalism and the exotic and suggests that early modern Europeans had more nuanced responses to Asia than previously imagined.