Blurring the boundaries: intellectual and cultural interactions between the Eastern and Western; Christian and Muslim worlds

Although a number of Ottomanists have, in recent years, integrated the Ottoman Empire successfully into discussions of European history, studies of intellectual, artistic and socio-political developments in the Renaissance, with some notable exceptions, have tended to ignore the Ottoman Empire. Alternatively, they have employed it as a counterpoint designed to foreground Christian European cultural development; approached it as a source for Western artistic development; explored it as a repository for transmitted Christian European Renaissance developments; or examined it as the subject of Western Christian humanist inquiry.