An Early Modern Dialogue with Islam: Antonio de Sosa's Topography of Algiers (1612) is a book about cultural identity in the context of early modern Christian-Muslim contacts, conflicts, and exchanges. It is also a fascinating work whose own interdisciplinary scope, as the editor notes, is “at once an ethnographic, historical, and literary production” (3). In the growing scholarship on European perceptions of the Islamic Other and relations between Europe and the Ottoman Turks, Garcés's study and Armas Wilson's translation offer an important — and until now, at least in English language scholarship, underrepresented — perspective from Iberia on the Mediterranean contact zone linking Christian Europe and Islamic North Africa. This outstanding translation and meticulously researched introductory study and edition will capture the attention of a wide range of scholars, including those pursuing research on the Moriscos of Spain exiled in North Africa, and those scholars seeking links between crosscultural Christian-Muslim interaction in the Mediterranean, and European–non-European exchanges in the New World.

Garcés and Armas Wilson offer the first English translation and edition of the Topography of Algiers, a work written by the Portuguese-born, naturalized Spaniard Antonio de Sosa during his captivity in Algiers between 1577 and 1581, and published posthumously in Spain in 1612. The Topography of Algiers is the first in a project that aims to produce translations and editions of two other books that make up Sosa's multivolume work, Topografía, e Historia general de Argel. Sosa, who shared his captivity in Algiers with Miguel de Cervantes, was a secular priest and doctor of theology, and was captured by Barbary corsairs in 1577 while en route to take up the office of dean of the cathedral of Agrigento, Sicily. An erudite man and “[a] respected member of the Hispano-Italian ecclesiastical hierarchy” (57), Sosa was “familiar with the Greek and Roman classics and the works of the fathers of the church” (6). As an early modern ethnographic observer in Muslim lands, Sosa's European gaze and voice tend to dominate what Garcés views as a divided authorial stance: criticizing the religious practices of Turks and Algerians, while also praising the piety of good Muslims (3). The dialogic dynamics announced in the title of Garcés and Armas Wilson's work are rather overwhelmed by Sosa's monologic voice and single-view gaze. Although when viewed as a strategic affirmation of a hyper-pious Christian identity, the narrator's predominantly monologic tone and single-focus optics make perfect sense, and underscore also the function that the Islamic Other (and the non-European Other of the New World) played in shaping and asserting a Christian European identity in the Renaissance.

The broad scope and attention to detail of the Topography of Algiers is remarkable. As Garcés explains, “Sosa's Topography is constructed according to the medieval schema through which every city . . . was described” (17). Sosa describes in detail the city's fortifications (from an invader's gaze), the streets, and houses, as well as its multicultural inhabitants, such as Jewish renegades (like his master), other renegade types, Turks, Algerians, Christians, and corsairs. His eye for detail is notable, describing particulars ranging form Algerian women's makeup and fashion to specific improvements to the city's water supply. Sosa's punctilious description of the North African metropolis and its people is matched by Garcés's scrupulous and illuminating notes to each of the Topography’s forty-one brief chapters. Among those chapters, the one entitled “Languages and Currencies” offers a picture of the range of transcultural and commercial exchanges in the North African city. The lingua franca of the city is “a mixture of various Christian languages, largely Italian and Spanish words with some recently added Portuguese terms,” and coupled with “the bad pronunciation of the Moors and Turks” becomes “a veritable mumbo-jumbo” (185) that nonetheless facilitates communication and commercial exchange. Commerce and language are thus closely linked: the “mumbo-jumbo” of language is mirrored in the mixing of coin from multinational purses, and this intermingling is aggravated by the blurring of religious affiliations of the renegade.

That renegades are a target of Sosa's harsher judgments is not surprising. The renegade's in-between-status is troubling for the Hispano-Portuguese author, who notes that renegades “all tend to deceive themselves” in believing that they can pass for Muslims while remaining Christians within (228). But Sosa's scorn for renegades is fraught with irony form the moment the reader learns in Garcés's introduction that Sosa himself engaged in a form of passing. The Portuguese-born, naturalized Spaniard was actually “an ordained Augustinian friar, who had fled from his Order [in Portugal] by taking the habit of a lay priest” and heading for Spain (67). While writing about renegades and about the city where he was captive, Sosa was in fact an apostate, a charge revealed after Sosa returned to Spain and against which he defended himself successfully.

In their outstanding translation and edition, Armas Wilson and Garcés offer an important interdisciplinary and crosscultural contribution to the scholarship on Renaissance exchanges between Christians and Muslims in the Mediterranean orbit. The work is meticulously researched and annotated, and includes a useful glossary of Arabic, Turkish, and Spanish terms, as well as striking maps of Algiers, and color plates depicting the dress and customs of the multicultural Algerian inhabitants. The Topography of Algiers will arguably become a notable reference work in Renaissance studies on interactions between Europeans and Islamic Others.