(15)90s kids: Thomas Nashe [PREVIEW], A Son of the Silk Road in Merry Old England

(15)90s kids: Thomas Nashe [PREVIEW], A Son of the Silk Road in Merry Old England

From The Kingless Generation by Fergal Schmudlach

May 7, 2026 · 44 min · Episode 76

About this episode

This episode explores the influence of Arabic literature on Elizabethan England through the works of Thomas Nashe and the concept of the Sons of the Silk Road.

We continue our study of Elizabethan England, which is often mistakenly treated as an origin point of bourgeois revolutionary culture but which I hope to show is actually an endpoint for the subjectivity of the “Sons of the Silk Road” of Arabic literature, whose literary, religious, cryptographic, and financial antics in the bazaars and marketplaces of West Eurasia, Africa, and the European Ummah, inspired imitators among the crusaders and (re)conquistadors of Spain and Italy and, through them, a strange little island nation called England. This time we savor the acerbic wit of Thomas Nashe, poet of the continental wanderers known as intelligencers and used to great effect by Elizabeth’s spymaster Francis Walsingham. In his iconic depiction of the intelligencer in his picaresque novel The Unfortunate Traveller, we recognise extensive overlap with the fellowship of the Sons of the Silk Road as depicted by the 10th-c travelling Arab poet Abū Dulaf al-Khazrajī in his Qaṣīda sāsāniyya. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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