Women’s Epistolary Rhetorics in Late Sixteenth-Century Venetian–Ottoman Diplomacy

This essay analyzes how material and emotional rhetorics expressed in women’s letters were assessed by men in the Venetian diplomatic community both for veracity and as a potentially new pattern of power in international diplomacy between Venice and the Ottoman Empire during the late sixteenth century. The sophisticated strategies of the epistolarity developed by Ottoman royal women and their networks have been analyzed, but the contemporary reception of missives associated with these women in the diplomatic community has been less well explored. Yet, at a time when the political influence of Ottoman women appeared uncertain, this reception, within which texts moved through multiple hands and copies, contributed to the meaning and power of these letters, and of these women, in diplomatic activity. This essay explores how Venetian readers drew on their own gender-informed conventions of maternity and filiality, and how these might be performed through letters, to make sense both of material and emotional rhetorics that the missives expressed and of their political and diplomatic status. It argues that integrating gender, emotions, and materiality in the history of Venetian–Ottoman diplomacy enables us to nuance the role, and chart the dynamic trajectory, of Ottoman women as epistolary diplomatic actors.