What does a vibrant early modern manuscript culture actually look like when we stop regarding it simply as a lack of print?
Over the past thirty years, scholarship on the history of the book and reading has raised new questions for scholars of European, East Asian, and South Asian history, making us rethink issues like authorship, reception, the transmission of knowledge and more. At the same time, this literature has some gaps, especially when it comes to understanding earlymodern manuscript cultures. Exploring this lacuna is particularly relevant now that scholars have challenged the fixity and singularity of print.
This workshop is a first attempt to bring together the growing number of scholars working on the history of the book in the Ottoman Empire to present and discuss theoretically informed papers that also delve deeply into historical evidence and sources. The workshop focuses specifically on manuscripts and the cultures and practices that allowed them to flourish. While there have been important scholars who have written on the topic of books and libraries in the early modern Middle East, an engagement with the broader literature is often missing. Similarly, there has been some valuable works on the courtly production of books as precious objects, but often without a sense of reading and book production in the larger society. To introduce new approaches, the workshop invites participants to directly engage with the more recent literature on the history of the book and reading (Roger Chartier, Ann Blair, Adrian Johns, Robert Darnton, etc.) and to use its insights to understand how the varied manuscript cultures of the Ottoman Empire functioned. In particular, we would like to broaden the scope of the inquiry and look at books and reading in the larger society and even explore the notion that there was a general expansion of reading, writing, and book production in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To do so, this workshop brings together the perspectives of historians of the book, art historians, historians of science, codicologists, and others to understand the connections between the material culture of manuscripts and their content.
The workshop focuses on discussion of pre-circulated papers that participants will briefly present to the audience. It is open to the public but because space is limited, we ask those who wish to attend to please pre-register by June 1, 2014 by contacting Julia Aylin Kolcu at the Orient-Institut at oiist(at)oidmg.org. For all other inquiries, please contact the organizer, Nir Shafir, at nshafir(at)ucla.edu