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Genres in Transit: Movement of Geographical Forms in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire
Abstract
My paper titled “Genres in Transit: Movement of Geographical Forms in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire,” studies the mobility of geographical works in the early modern intellectual world. Focusing on four geographical genres, namely cosmography, the book of routes and realms, portolan charts, and the atlas, I trace the movement of geographical method, scope, and stylistic elements in the early modern context. From the fourteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century, cosmographical treatises dominated Ottomans’ understanding of geography. This genre of scholarship served as an encyclopedia of its time, providing “comprehensive and accessible compendia of essential knowledge.” The book of routes and realms can also traced back to early Islamic mapping, which based on a regional division of space. The remnants of this regionalism resonate in the seventeenth century Ottoman geographical works, where strip maps of regions are drawn in the margins of manuscripts. Along similar lines, stylistic elements, too, moved across geographical genres. For instance, the compass rose, the wind rose, and the rhumb lines are regarded to be stylistic characteristics of the portolan charts. All these features of what has come to be identified as a portolan chart were essential for the practical purposes these charts served for: the rhumb lines demonstrated the course in lines, the compass provided the sailors to position themselves vis-à-vis the chart. Yet still, these images found in their way into the Ottoman atlas¬. The legacy of the compass and the compass rose reflects in İbrahim Müteferrika’s work, especially in his edition of Kâtib Çelebi’s Cihannümâ. All in all, focusing on the movement of various geographical genres, namely cosmography, portolan charts, the book of routes and realms, and atlases, my paper traces continuity and change in geographical knowledge and demonstrates how the act of knowing—the form of a geographical work—shaped knowledge in early modernity.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Ottoman Empire
Sub Area
13th-18th Centuries