This paper is part of a chapter in my dissertation on the Ottoman scribal community of the late seventeenth century. The main argument of the dissertation is that the late seventeenth century saw the emergence of a scribal discourse that defined scribes as an intellectual community. The critical figure behind this was the grand vizier Rami Mehmed Paşa (d.1708) who came from inside the scribal corps and was the first among his peers to attain such a high political rank. This paper will discuss how the idea of a scribal community, with its newly defined intellectual content, was actualized on the existing social networks. On the practical terrain of social relations, penholders had to build and maintain real social ties that would ensure their viability in the Ottoman political system. While the main setting for this was the grandee households, the key element in entering into the social networks was the panegyrics (kaside) written to honor the grandees often with expectations for political posts (mansıb). This paper will first examine the biographical dictionaries of poets (tezkire-i şuara) written in the early eighteenth century to reconstruct the scribal networks of the time. Rami Mehmed later in his career was able to transfer the political power he gained into an elaborate patronage network, which sheltered many lesser scribes. The paper will later focus on the panegyrics written in the second half of the seventeenth century by scribes to honor more senior bureaucrats including Rami Mehmed. Overall in these “scribal panegyrics,” scribes not only made the most of the literary arsenal of traditional metaphors and topoi related to scribal profession but also left us the most comprehensive pronunciations of scribal ideals in Ottoman history. In the discursive world of the panegyric, the scribe, as the embodiment of literary skills emerges as introducing a degree of sophistication to the political realm which had until then been crowded by “ignoramuses.”