Traveling Boys in the Mediterranean Available to Purchase

Chapter 1 revisits Marlowe’s invention of Leander’s homoerotic abduction in the Hellespont in his retelling of the classical Hero and Leander. Marlowe’s poem belongs to the short-lived genre of epyllion, which has often been analyzed as male English poets’ literary reflections of their humanist training. This chapter situates the poem and its Mediterranean setting in the geohistorical context of the sixteenth century and connects the Ganymede imagery in the poem to beautiful Christian boys abducted by the Ottomans as ganimet (booty) within the devşirme system, which was frequently depicted in English travelogues. The chapter cross-reads the representation of Leander as Ganymede against and beside the Ottomans’ cataloguing of beautiful boys from various ethnic and religious backgrounds based on their beauty in a hierarchy that functioned to regulate eroticized racial and imperial desire. Leander’s homoerotic abduction speaks to these historical boys in the Mediterranean.