Ottoman Society: Thomas Glover's Guide for the Visitor

Given Thomas Glover's background (born and raised in Constantinople) and his multi-lingual competence, we might expect him to have a much more thorough familiarity with Ottoman Society than some of the other authors in this series. But his accounts are more terse, high-level summaries than some of the others. Perhaps, being a "local" he didn't have the same fascination and curiosity that led some of the other authors to write more extensively. His knee-jerk distaste for the idea of lesbian sex in the bath houses may well reflect a solidly western European attitude (his father was English, after all), but we can't discount the possibility that it reflects the default male attitude towards the topic in Constantinople. As Glover (along with all the other male writers) emphasizes, it isn't as if he could have direct evidence of what women were doing in the baths, so we should conclude that the topic was "common knowledge" regardless of how accurate the details were.

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