The age of the perplexed : translating nature and bodies between the Ottoman Empire and Europe, 1650-1730
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- "The Age of the Perplexed: Translating Nature and Bodies between the Ottoman Empire and Europe, 1650-1730" examines scholarly engagements across cultures as a lens onto debates about the relationship between knowledge and uncertainty in the early modern world. It reveals the intertwined stories of religious conflict, natural history, medical authority, and translation which illustrate an important episode of intellectual genealogy fostering the idea of human difference in physical, spiritual, and moral domains. Over the course of their increasing interactions stimulated by religious, diplomatic, commercial, and intellectual agendas, Ottoman and European scholars faced a set of questions that still continues to resonate. Do all human beings have an essential nature? Were human bodies interchangeable in the medical context, or were "Turkish" bodies essentially different both emotionally and physically? Perplexed by the dilemma of understanding one other, both Ottomans and Europeans saw cultural encounters as an opportunity to raise questions about the universality of knowledge and human nature. This project demonstrates the boundaries of what constituted knowledge exchange in an age of early modern globalization and religious turmoil. I approach the question of knowledge exchange from the differing perspectives of a diverse community of Ottoman and European scholars, historians, physicians, natural philosophers, apothecaries, drug traders, preachers, and jurists between Istanbul and Europe. Each of these episodes reveals how efforts to bridge and differentiate distinct human societies were conducted through the medium of translation. Rather than seeing translation as a unidirectional process, this dissertation delineates what made translations successful or contingent failures by explaining how they created new perceptions of nature, human bodies, faith, and uncertainty, both in the Ottoman Empire and Europe. "The Age of the Perplexed" advances scholarship on the history of knowledge and history of early modern science and medicine. While a growing number of Ottoman and European scholars were certain about why having foreign knowledge would make a difference for them, they also realized that knowledge in circulation was too unstable and uncertain to be definitive. Consequently, the rhetoric of uncertainty became a new mode of inquiry and a highly productive strategy; factual and trustworthy knowledge was not necessarily the first intention in cross-cultural scholarly engagements. The knowledge that emerged at the nexus of the Islamic world and Europe, with all of its contradictions and ambiguities, raised critical questions about the limits of human knowledge. Fundamentally, these seventeenth-century conversations offered new possibilities to accommodate anxieties about what it meant to essentialize other societies—the people, their bodies, and their faith. .
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2021; ©2021 |
| Publication date | 2021; 2021 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Yildirim, Duygu |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Findlen, Paula |
| Thesis advisor | Findlen, Paula |
| Thesis advisor | Crews, Robert D, 1970- |
| Thesis advisor | Mikhail, Alan, 1979- |
| Thesis advisor | Riskin, Jessica |
| Degree committee member | Crews, Robert D, 1970- |
| Degree committee member | Mikhail, Alan, 1979- |
| Degree committee member | Riskin, Jessica |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of History |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Duygu Yildirim. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of History. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2021. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/rg789xp1344 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2021 by Duygu Yildirim
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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