Refashioning Boys Available to Purchase

Chapter 4 analyzes Thomas Sanders’s account of English boys who were captured and circumcised in the Mediterranean, which the English perceived as a dangerously sodomitical space. Circumcision was frequently discussed in English writing. Mapping circumcision discourses in a wide array of texts, including Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turn’d Turk and Shakespeare’s Othello, this chapter reveals how Ottoman bodies and their everyday practices were perceived as a great threat to the male bodies of European and Christian boys. Imagining those bodies as abducted and sodomized by Turks evoked a nightmare that manifested itself in circumcision narratives. In contrast, circumcision was celebrated in entirely positive terms in Ottoman accounts, as demonstrated in Ottoman festivity books (surname). Exploring circumcision comparatively, this chapter shows that the religious conversion of boys necessitated conversions of their bodies as sites of cultural, religious, political, and erotic negotiations.