What Did the Ottomans Read? Books and Readers in the Ottoman Literary World, 1300-1600

A lecture by Murat Umut Inan (Social Sciences University of Ankara)

Which literary texts were popular among Ottoman readers and why? What can we say about the reception of Arabic and Persian literary classics in Ottoman communities of readership? Taking up these questions, this talk maps out the readerly reception of literary texts in the early modern Ottoman Empire and explores readership, practices of reading and interpretation, and textual circulation in the Ottoman context by drawing on a corpus of commentaries and manuscript marginalia.    

Murat Umut Inan is the Ahmanson-Getty Post-Doctoral fellow at the UCLA Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies, and Assistant Professor of Ottoman and Turkish studies at the Social Sciences University of Ankara, Turkey. He received his Ph.D. in Near and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Washington, Seattle in 2012. His research interests focus on Ottoman and Persian literatures, and on the literary, cultural and textual relations and transmissions in the medieval and early modern Islamic world. Currently, he is completing a book manuscript entitled Ottomans Reading Persian Classics: Literary Reception and Interpretation in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, where he explores the reception of Persian language and literary classics in Ottoman literature, scholarship, and society between 1300‒1600.

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Duration: 47:28