Duygu Yildirim

What happens when fragmentary and too much information is flowing across the world? This article sketches the emergence of one such informational flow through the ubiquitous concept of 'new medicine' in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire in a historiographical corrective. Rather than presenting it as a unified category, I argue that Ottoman physicians used 'new' as a loose, multivalent and discursive term whose potentiality lay in its malleability for future use. Ready to bear any contingent meaning at a certain point in the future, the 'new' became a strategic tool to cope with the uncertainties evoked by early modern globalization and local epistemic crisis. It also helped Ottoman scholars and physicians develop a tentative design for how much information, and of what sort, was just enough for the learned and laypeople to know during precarious times. I further discuss the fact that since the Ottoman motivation for the usage of the notion of the 'new' is without a decisive motive, it still haunts our historiographical debates about what was truly new about Ottoman science.

Translations, whether in the form of text, illustration, or interpretive analysis, served knowledge-making in multiple ways. It offered a refuge, severed contexts, and concealed the various workers that created it. Over the course of the seventeenth century, European naturalists in Istanbul, such as Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli (1658-1730), procured illustrations of Ottoman nature as fundamental resources to identify, collect, and compare indigenous plants and newly bred varieties. Despite maintaining an actual mediation for cross-cultural interactions, these sources of virtual communication remain largely forgotten in modern scholarship. This article argues that this curious yet invisible corpus was not a nonagentive medium in an alienated leisure of a gentlemanscholar; instead, these illustrations were designed to call upon the viewer's constant attention in self-motivated scientific labor. Such handy tools responded and contributed to early modern scholars' modes of working, and in exchange they determined these sources' own function, position, and visibility-either as a by-product or as a derivative. It is therefore only when integrated into the labor history of science that the degrees of invisibility pertaining to both Ottoman nature studies and self-directed labor can come into a granular view.

As an imperial city at the crossroads, Istanbul functioned as a window onto debates about the complex relation between faith and knowledge during an era of interreligious conflict and changing political allegiances. Taking seventeenth-century Istanbul as a case study, this article examines how and why religious conflict unintentionally led to a new form of religious dialogue that stimulated knowledge exchange between Muslims and Christians. The changing nature of interreligious dialogue between Ottomans and Europeans occurred in the context of ongoing religious crises on both sides: within Muslim communities and between Western and Eastern Christianities. It argues that confessional conflict ironically helped to develop grounds for a rapprochement between Ottoman and European intellectual worlds to redefine faith beyond the textual domains of theology. Through scholarly engagements, learned Europeans began to appreciate commonality with respect to matters of faith, while also becoming gradually aware that distinct individuals of the same religion vary on the nature of true faith. Faith eventually began to be understood in its own pluralities and irreconcilable conflicts through everyday encounters in Istanbul. By comparing faiths in Islam, early modern scholars faced the paradox of their own time: the irreducibility of religious difference within any one religion. Recapturing the genealogy of the comparative approach to faith in the form of dialogue, this study sheds light on the origins of religious relativism, which is conventionally associated with the European Enlightenment.

Focusing on Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli’s neglected treatise, "Bevanda asiatica" (1685), this article explores knowledge exchanges between the Ottomans and Europeans in the late seventeenth century. "Bevanda asiatica" was based on Hezarfenn Hüseyin’s encyclopedic entry on coffee as well as on Marsigli’s own experiences both as a naturalist and as a slave-cook in Ottoman lands. Marsigli stated that Hezarfenn’s empirically driven depiction of the coffee plant was “the most original source” on coffee. By analyzing how and why Marsigli selected Hezarfenn’s text, this article sheds light onto the practices of cross-cultural knowledge exchanges in the early modernity.

Abstract: What is knowledge’s affect? Is it bitter like coffee or melancholic like the bodies that consume it? This essay examines the paradoxical relationship between sense and scientific sensibility in the making of knowledge about coffee. As an iconic beverage of early modern globalization, coffee belied easy categorization. Baffled drinkers of coffee—from naturalists and physicians to merchants—tried to come up with a sufficiently expansive definition of this new and ambiguous plant from the Ottoman lands. Europeans had to rely on their senses, particularly gustatory, while creating an embodied knowledge of coffee. This sensational encounter with the Turkish drink, however, brought new anxieties to occlude the fellow feeling among coffee drinkers across religions, resulting in a differentiation of the innately melancholic Turkish body. Inter-cultural encounters of the senses around coffee thus embodied the tension between alienating the self from the object of inquiry and peering into sensations as an epistemic practice.


In Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds (Routledge, 2023), ed. by Mackenzie Cooley, Anna Toledano, Duygu Yıldırım.


https://www.routledge.com/Natural-Things-in-Early-Modern-Worlds/Cooley/p/book/9781032397207

“Merak ve Endişe Çeperinde Kahve: Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’ndan Avrupa’ya Bedenin Bir Tarihi [Coffee at the Periphery of Curiosity and Anxiety: A History of the Body from the Ottoman Empire to Europe],” Toplumsal Tarih [Social History], 336 (2021): 64-69.

Elias Muhanna. The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018. 232 pages. ISBN: 9781400887859. In the age of Wikipedia, encyclopedias seem to offer an openly editable content. Yet there was a time when ambitious individuals sought to write compendiums of universal knowledge on their own. Some of them failed because they did not live long enough to complete such enormous projects; however, one of those who succeeded was the late medieval scholar al-Nuwayrī (d. 733/1333). Elias Muhanna's book recounts how this scholar managed to create such an enormous compendium.

Designing Natural Things: How Images Make Meaning in History of Science

How do you capture the essence of a history about monstrous squids and the shipmates who ate them, and poisonous manchineel trees? Using text to set the scene is one thing. Taking seriously the visual record left in the wake of these histories and using those elements to create something new is another. Since founding the Natural Things research group at Stanford University in 2015, we have been wrestling with the connection between design work and natural history. When it comes to premodern sources, European natural histories are some of the most lavishly illustrated texts found in the scientific oeuvre. Authors and artists often worked together to create images that would allow readers to identify plants, animals, and minerals for themselves. Our musings slipped into a question: How did premodern scholars of nature think through images, and how could we echo that process in a way intelligible to today’s readers?


https://4sonline.org/news_manager.php?page=32001