Accusations of Albanian rape of Serbs in Kosovo became a highly charged political factor in the development of Serbian nationalism in the 1980s. Discussions of rape were used to link perceptions of national victimisation and a crisis of masculinity and to legitimate a militant Serbian nationalism, ultimately contributing to the violent break-up of Yugoslavia. The article argues for attention to the ways that nationalist projects have been structured with reference to ideals of masculinity, the specific political and cultural contexts that have influenced these processes, and the consequent implications for gender relations as well as for nationalist politics. Such an approach helps explain the appeal of MiloSeviC's nationalism; a t the same time it highlights the divisions and conflicts that lie behind hegemonic gender and national identities constructed around difference.On 1 May 1985 an army employee and part-time farmer, Djordje MartinoviC, a Serb, appeared in the hospital in Gnjilane, a primarily Albanian town in Kosovo, with a bottle wedged up his rectum, puncturing his large intestine. He reported that as he had worked in his field outside Gnjilane he had been attacked by two hooded Albanians who had tied and drugged him and assaulted him with the bottle. Under interrogation he was said to have confessed that he had injured himself in an act of sexual selfstimulation, though he subsequently denied this and reiterated his original story. Different interpretations of what had actually happened (encouraged by conflicting statements from the authorities) circulated widely, polarising public opinion. The case of Djordje MartinoviC was one of the earliest and most notorious stories of nationalist violence with a sexual subtext that came out of Kosovo in the 1980s, but it was far from the only one. Accusations that Albanians were raping Serbian women followed. From * A CREES visiting associate professorship at Stanford University made it possible for me to begin this project. I am also indebted to the staff of the Hoover Library, Sava PeiC of the British Library, and DuSan PuvaEiC, for providing me with research materials. A number of colleagues have read different versions of this article; I am particularly grateful to Pamela Ballinger, Jasna DragoviC, Rada DrezgiC, Ger Duijzings, Gale Stokes and Bob Shoemaker for their comments (and their patience).

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Ritual brotherhood, or pobratimstvo, is attested by a range of sources dealing with the Adriatic hinterland between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Read one way, pobratimstvo shows us a border society characterized by cohesion and tolerance, where Christian and Muslim frontiersmen find ways to overcome religious and political boundaries, recognizing their common interests and shared values. Read another way, however, the same institution (and sometimes even the same documents) also offers an insight into the persistence of frontier conflict and the pervasiveness of its violence, drawing attention to other, no less bloody divisions between predators and victims. In teasing out some of the possible meanings and uses of ritual sworn brotherhood on this early modern frontier, I attempt to give due weight to the complexities of a specific place and culture. But the problems highlighted by the institution of pobratimstvo are more widespread: the troubling ambiguities of friendship, with its quality of simultaneously including and excluding; the boundaries between affection and interest, or between camaraderie and desire; the obligations (and the potential resentment) conferred by gifts; the moral dilemmas posed by cross-cutting obligations.

How did Europeans read and respond to foreign travel writing about their societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? The importance of the genre in shaping its readers' views of the world is often assumed. The problem, as usual with the history of reading, is one of evidence for travel writing's wider influence. As one scholar has memorably phrased it: 'reading is not eating'. i Consuming books is not the same as consuming food: we cannot assume that travellers' perceptions were shared by those who read their accounts. This hasn't prevented conclusions being drawn about the importance of the genre for a home readership's knowledge about the world, and ideas about their place in it, for instance in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Britain, where travel writing is credited both with fostering free thinking and with confirming a smug ethnocentricity. ii Evidence for direct influence is, however, scant, even where travel writing's place in reading patterns can be mapped. iii Travel writing of the same period is also attributed key significance in other European societies, where the 'gaze of the other', apprehended through foreign accounts, is credited with shaping collective identities and national ideologies. Here, self-differentiation was supposedly spurred by the alterity attributed to these societies by travellers from Europe's North-West, while the vernacular reiteration of tropes of backwardness or inferiority is taken as evidence of the internalization of travellers' characterizations. iv However, ambivalent or self-stigmatizing national discourses are one thing; attributing them directly to foreign travel writing and a hegemonic Western gaze is another. Here too, the links are usually inferred rather than demonstrated.Asking precisely how readers received foreign accounts about their societies, and how they reacted to the depictions they found there, is worth pursuing beyond these issues of knowledge and self-knowledge. Such a project goes a long way towards fulfilling the transnational potential offered by travel writing studiesby opening to scrutiny intercultural circuits of communication, influence and interaction, so often viewed from only one perspective, that of the western European traveller. Doing this means following the challenge Mary Louise Pratt laid down more than two decades ago, of paying attention to the 'travellee' (her slightly awkward coinage describing those people who were travelled to), and tracing the