The Oriental Outpost of the Republic of Letters

Not always has the Orient been the Orient. The academic public would agree today that Orientalism is a product of western minds with an imperial agenda, but not much of the discussion in the aftermath of Edward Saids monumental statement has seriously considered historical settings before 1800. Hence it is still widely assumed that knowledge-power relations are intimate by- products only of Western European national state imperialism. Around 1600, one of the realms actually bearing the title empire was the Holy Roman Empire. Its elected rulers, the Habsburg emperors, heirs to ideas of imperial universalism, strove to deal with issues of confessional war and colonial expansion, to balance the familial union with Spain and the competition with France, and, not least, to come to terms with the new south-eastern neighbour: The Ottoman Empire, which during the 15th and 16th centuries had conquered large parts of the Balkans and Hungary. It was certainly not the first nor the only encounter between the Muslim and the Christian world, nor was the imperial librarian Sebastian Tengnagel the first mediator of knowledge in this regard; but it was the first time that this encounter occurred in a context in which, on the western side, the systematic acquisition and curation of knowledge became an integral part of the process of state building. Court libraries played a pivotal role in this process, as they not only became the material manifestations of a knowledge believed to be both universal and dynamic, but they also represented the scholarly arsenals from which to draw the weapons of intellectual warfare. At the same time, however, they were viewed as repositories of knowledge used, augmented and treasured by the citizens of the res publica literaria: an imagined community of scholars built on the ethics of friendship and the goal of a common enhancement of knowledge, yet also a filtered mirror of political, military and human tensions. Sebastian Tengnagel belonged to both worlds in that he was the Habsburg rulers court librarian from 1608 to his death in 1636 as well as an active member of the international community of scholars. Large parts of his correspondence are dedicated to the enrichment of the collection of manuscripts, among them that of Oriental manuscripts which his predecessors had started to gather; much of the material written by him that has survived until today documents his work with manuscripts in Arabic, Ottoman and Hebrew. The project aims to investigate the intrinsic relationship between the redefined position of the Holy Roman Empire on a global scale and the knowledge about the Orient that came through Europe filtered by the imperial library of Vienna.

FWF project "The Oriental Outpost of the Republic of Letters" (P-30511) investigated early modern oriental scholarship in Central Europe through the papers, correspondence and manuscripts of Vienna court librarian Sebastian Tengnagel (d. 1636). Tengnagel, a Dutch scholar with a late-humanist background, directed the imperial library in the decades of political and intellectual radicalization. His collecting of oriental manuscripts can be read as a timely Central European answer to the Republic of Letter's growing interest in a historical and cultural contextualization of Christianity, but also as a means of acquiring knowledge useful for the sake of state power in the emerging Habsburg Monarchy. The outcomes of the project will be a collectively authored monograph presenting Tengnagel as a case study in pre-modern transregional intellectual history; a series of accompanying journal articles and book chapters; as well as datasets of c. 100 oriental manuscripts related to Tengnagel, and of c. 700 letters of his correspondence kept at the Austrian National Library. These results will be available at the end of 2024 at the latest.