![]() I have chosen sections of this letter to illuminate Lady Mary’s intimate eye-witness account of a hammam for women: These were the last few words of the lengthy letter written by Lady Mary on 1 April 1717 to an unknown ‘Lady’ living in England. ‘tis no less than death for a man to be found in one of these places”. She was the first European woman to document in vivid detail, and with comparative accuracy, the daily activities and customs of Muslim women, including the sacrosanct time that women spent in the Turkish hammam or bagnio (communal bathing house): “. ![]() There are times when Lady Mary reveals her Eurocentric attitudes and English aristocratic snobbery however, most of the time she was a sympathetic traveller. Her direct observations of Ottoman culture supported her status as an authoritative commentator as she travelled from England through Eastern Europe to Constantinople (Istanbul) with her husband, Edward, the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and their three-year old son. Lady Mary was an avid letter writer and I imagine that she would have loved the immediacy of communication via twitter and email if she lived today. ” wrote Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) from Andrianople (now Edirne, on Turkey’s border with Bulgaria) on 1 April 1717. ![]()
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