With Olympian bravado, Lou Ruprecht delivers an audacious work charting cultural and ethnic mixing in Crete from the Neolithic Age to the present. Drawing on a vast range of reading, archival research, and archaeological excavation, the book offers a bold and urgently needed analysis of cosmopolitanism.

Gregory Jusdanis, Humanities Distinguished Professor, The Ohio State University

Louis Ruprecht has written a sweeping history of Crete as “the mixed place,” a place where peoples, cultures, and languages mingle, giving rise to the new and unforeseen. If Cretan mixing was a powerful source of political anxiety (as mixing so often is), Ruprecht insists that it was also a wellspring of pleasure and possibility. At once learned and lively, Cosmopolitan Crete is no less than a spirited defense of the traditions of encounter and exchange that can animate shared life in a diverse society.

Molly Farneth, Haverford College

In a work of astonishingly rich and engaging erudition, Ruprecht critically transmutes the historical stereotypes of Crete as home to liars, pirates, and bandits into a vision of persistently effervescent cultural mixing and creativity. Tracing the durable calumnies from prehistory to the Renaissance, he exposes in their place the robust reality of ingenuity and sharing that shaped a complex cultural universe. A few asides on the bureaucratic and political manipulations of culture today reinforce the central theme of how easily a collective reputation for violence, such as still afflicts the island's reputation, can distort the historical reality of cultural vitality.

Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University

In this book Ancient Greek mythos of the mixing of peoples, which typified Crete as both “monstrous and marvelous” becomes Ruprecht's template for exploring receptions of the island's ethnic, linguistic, and cultural mixing by centuries of imperial powers. From Roman depictions of 'monstrous' Cretan pirates to the Venetian embrace of Crete's 'marvelous' mixing as a new cosmopolitanism, Ruprecht presents a formidable transhistorical analysis of Crete and its mixing and convinces us that cosmopolitanism's gift is also its greatest challenge: to dwell in a space where solidarities must emerge irrespective of ethnic, social, and cultural identities.

Wesley Barker, Mercer University