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“The Most Vile and Barbarous Nation ofall the World”: Giles Fletcher the Elder’s The Tartars Or, Ten Tribes (ca. 1610)*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Richard W. Cogley
Richard W. Cogley*
Affiliation:
Southern Methodist University
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Abstract

There was an ongoing controversy in seventeenth-century England about the ten lost tribes of Israel. The debate centered on the theoretical question of whether or not the lost tribes continued to exist as a distinct ethnic group. Surprisingly little attention was paid to what might seem to be the first order of business in any national referendum about the lost tribes: determining where they were. Fletcher’s book, which argued that the lost tribes survived as (and not merely lived among) the Tartars of central and northeastern Asia, was one of the few statements written in seventeenth-century England about the location of the missing people.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 58 , Issue 3 , Fall 2005 , pp. 781 - 814
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 Renaissance Society of America

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Footnotes

*

The author wishes to thank Johan Elverskog and Matt Goldish for their contributions to this essay.

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