MZIS Vortragsreihe: Nil Palabiyik (LMU, München), Empires of Knowledge: How Ottoman Scholarship Shaped Oriental Studies in Early Modern Europe
28.05.2019
Seventeenth-century Europe saw an unprecedented level of linguistic and scholarly activity not only in Arabic but also in Turkish and Persian. The engagement with languages of the East and works written in them came in many different forms including the study of religious, scientific, literary and philosophical texts, and the printing of the first dictionaries, grammars and phrasebooks of these languages.
The lecture will explore how the flow of information from Middle East to Western Europe worked by considering the crucial role Ottoman Turkish dictionaries, commentaries, glossaries and translations played in the rise of Oriental studies in Europe. I argue that early modern Orientalism was not an independent European deciphering of the East without recourse to the vast reserves of Ottoman scholarship as often maintained. On the contrary, it was, to a large extent, shaped by contemporary Ottoman learned practices and the reference tools used in the Ottoman Empire.
Die MZIS Vorträge finden Dienstags um 18 Uhr c. t. im Hörsaal M 014 Universitätshauptgebäude Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 statt.
In Zusammenarbeit mit der Gesellschaft der Freunde Islamischer Kunst und Kultur und der Deutsch-Türkischen Gesellschaft Bayern e. V.