This dissertation brings together a wide variety of print images of Muslims by Netherlandish artists from the early modern period, roughly 1400 to 1700. While scholars have studied early modern Italian and German images of Muslims in some detail, no study until now specifically focuses on the woodcuts, engravings, and etchings of Muslims by Dutch and Flemish artists. My work is the first to argue that as contact between actual Muslims and Netherlandish artists becomes more commonplace later in the sixteen century and into the seventeenth century, the resultant print images present a view of Muslims that is increasingly nuanced and true-to-life. My dissertation further analyzes the print genre as a global art form due to the portability of prints and confirms that Netherlandish print images of Muslims lived long, transnational lives in the New World and beyond.

Chapter 1 uses the theoretical concept of temporality to explicate my emphasis on contemporaneous, non-Christian imagery while clarifying terminology and analyzing related medieval examples of European representations of Muslims. The second chapter contends that fifteenth-century Netherlandish print images of turbaned figures sometimes represent Muslims and sometimes do not; effectively, Netherlandish artists in this period use turbaned figures to represent that which is eastern, foreign, and non-Christian without much attention to the realities about which people in the fifteenth century actually wore turbans. The third chapter claims that sixteenth-century Netherlandish print images of Muslims become more nuanced and true-to-life as the turban starts to become almost exclusively associated with the image of the Muslim. In the fourth chapter, I argue that trade rules the day in seventeenth-century Netherlandish prints, which depict Muslims, highlighting the Dutch tolerance for differing religious mores if these Muslims exemplify reliable trading partners. Finally, the fifth chapter presents an in-depth case study of a truly transcultural work of art — a seventeenth-century folding screen, or biombo, made in viceregal Mexico but based on a Dutch print series that illustrates the 1683 Battle of Vienna between the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Empire.