Early Modern Ottoman Culture of Learning

In our project we intend to explore some aspects of the Early Modern Ottoman culture of learning, in particular those areas of learning used and cultivated outside the official Ottoman institutions of learning, the medreses. Our main sources for this investigation will be the encyclopaedia Netaic ül-fünun of the 16th century scholar and poet Nevi and a number of mecmuas preserved in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek and the Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv in Vienna. Our project has two main aims, one basically related to cultural history, the other to pragmatic philological issues: As for cultural history we intend to explore the early modern culture of what can be called the "general" or "popular learning" of educated Ottomans with regard to its own historical context and cultural concepts. The Netaic will be compared to other encyclopaedias and scientific works, especially Ottoman. The Netaic and the mecmuas will be investigated with regard to their sources, and the backgrounds of their authors and compilers, and of their readers and users. The question of the "popularization" of learning will be raised in particular with regard to the way in which the authors of these works made use of their sources, how the learning was presented, and how the works were used. We will pay special attention to the role of poetry in the Ottoman culture of learning and the way it was applied in the Netaic and the mecmuas. The philological objectives of the project include the compilation of a full critical edition and translation of the Netaic and an edition and translation of selected parts of the mecmuas. The circumstances of the Netaic`s transmission is particularly interesting, and in the course of this project we will explore possible solutions to the problem of editing a text that is today available in a great number of manuscripts (around 60), some of which differ considerably from each other - a situation not unusual for popular Ottoman works. Also, we intend to create an open access database containing the verses, themes, motives, and authors and titles of the various books cited or mentioned in the Netaic and the mecmuas. The editions, translations, and the database will provide a solid foundation for further scholarship on Ottoman cultural and literary history. The realization of this project is possible because of the unusually varied "pool of competencies" represented by the participants, specialists in literary history, cultural history, and history of science, with extensive experience with archives and manuscripts. The fruits of this project therefore should be multifaceted and important for the future of Ottoman scholarly editing.

The project had two unequally weighted core areas that were closely related: 1) For the most part it was an editorial project with a distinct philological objective: The critical editing of a large number of academically transcribed texts relevant to the question of popular knowledge and the provision of an English translation of the most significant of these. A total of approximately 950 manuscripts were edited. As a by-product of this work with the manuscripts it was possible to determine their hitherto uncertain origin (Hungary) with a high degree of certainty. As for the texts, one is a popular 16th century encyclopaedic work which exists solely in Austrian collections in six manuscripts, the Netaic el-Fünun (Findings of the Sciences), compiled by Nevi and dealing with 14 different fields of knowledge. The other is a selection of six miscellanies (mecmua) from the collections in the Austrian National Library. They contain numerous entries which provide us with a revealing picture of the knowledge which was of relevance in the Ottoman Empire in the 16th and 17th centuries. An important outcome of this project was the construction of an open-access databank containing the digital editions of all the texts. In collaboration with the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities (ACDH) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences all texts were digitalized, provided with extensive indices and are (now) freely available at http://www.acdh.ac.at/mecmua. This large digital corpus, providing a useful basis for further research into Ottoman cultural and literary history but also for botany, medicine and astronomy, for example, can be found in the European CLARIN repository, ensuring that it will remain available without any time restrictions. 2) Another of the projects aims was to ascertain the general knowledge or applied knowledge of educated Ottomans on the basis of these texts. The findings of the detailed study of the Netaic encyclopaedia and the anthologies represent an import contribution to our information on the knowledge relevant for Ottoman everyday life, so that value was accorded to their written tradition. These include areas such as hemerology (the counting of days), accountancy, prayers for use in the field of medicine, agriculture and in domestic situations, incantations, oracles and prophecies. A further outcome is the insight gained into the role of religion, especially popular religion, in Ottoman knowledge culture and the unexpected extent to which virtually all areas of knowledge were penetrated by religious or folk religious elements.