The development of neuroscience-based theories of mind-culture relations and the plasticity of the brain suggests an approach to the history of emotions that treats historical cultural artifacts, such as poems, songs, and images, as traces of the cultural patterning of neural pathways. Based on work by history of emotions theorists such as William Reddy and the Ottoman literature specialist Walter G. Andrews and cultural neuroscience theorists such as Shinobu Kitayama and Steve Tompson, the paper will examine the case of bonding, separation, and separation-related emotions reflected in Ottoman panegyric and love poetry and instantiated in Ottoman social structures. It will advance a hypothesis that Ottoman culture scripts not only social behaviors but shapes the internal architecture of the brain and consequent unmediated “emotional” reactions to real-world events. My argument will rest in part on visualizing computational data derived from the programmatic analysis of digital transcriptions of the divans of the late 15th and early 16th century master-poets Baki and Necati. Beyond demonstrating how Ottoman poetry may constitute a repeated brain-shaping “cultural task”, the paper will suggest that if brain-patterning behaviors and their consequences can be identified and linked, this opens up possibilities for evidence-based histories of emotions and emotional communities that would enhance fruitful exchanges among neuroscientists, psychologists, social scientists, and “humanities” scholars. Moreover, it will suggest that a humanistic approach to ‘brain science’ might be a useful theoretical platform for an emergent history of emotions field in Ottoman cultural studies.

Buildings have what materialist Jane Bennett identifies as a thing-power: they can inspire, provoke and generate emotions among attentive audiences who look at or visit them. But can these emotions really be considered a universal (biological) phenomenon that everybody would feel? The short answer is no. In this paper I shall demonstrate how the early modern Ottoman elite formed a joint emotional community, whose members were encouraged to practice a unique sense of bewilderment at Ottoman architecture. The early modern Ottoman elite translated bewilderment as wonder. A theory dealing with this emotion was first introduced to the elite in different medieval Islamic treatises written on Wonders-of-Creation. These treatises aimed to examine both the mental and physical nature of wonder. Readers were expected to experience this when they were unable to understand the cause of a thing or how it was supposed to influence them when they saw it for the first time. As such, cosmographies encourage their potential readers to turn sights of aesthetics experiences into an insightful experience of bewilderment/wonder. In early modern Ottoman chronicles, treatises on architecture (e.g., Mimar Sinan's autobiographies), and travelogues (e.g., Evliya Çelebi's Book of Travels), this notion of bewilderment is mentioned in the context of imperial Ottoman monuments. Members of the elite were advised to contemplate imperial complexes like the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul for instance, or the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne, and turn their sights into an insightful experience of wonder. However, this kind of wonder cannot be considered a universal phenomenon; not all who visit these imperial buildings are automatically bound to be bewildered in the same way. Rather, the aforementioned emotional experience of wonder is exclusive to the potential readers who shared a joint early modern Ottoman mentality. Furthermore, this mentality did not continue among the Ottoman elite beyond the seventeenth century. At this point in history, with the influence of modern European studies on architecture, members of the elite abandoned the cosmographic theory of wonder and adopted the European perception of the aesthetics of the structures without the need for contemplation.

This presentation explores the seventeenth-century Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi's fears by examining the word “fear” (havf) in his Seyahatnâme (Book of Travels) in order to understand how this prominent traveler participated in, observed, and commented upon the seventeenth-century Ottoman cosmos. Focusing on the word havf in a seventeenth-century Ottoman travelogue is not only a methodological experiment to contribute to the emerging field on the history of emotions in the Ottoman context, but also a useful attempt to develop a holistic way of studying first-person narratives like Evliya Celebi's gigantic ten volumes. Thus, this presentation reveals part of Evliya Celebi’s identity as a seventeenth-century Ottoman elite through his fears. I evaluate Evliya Çelebi’s fears in five categories: First, I examine Evliya Çelebi’s fears of particular groups, including robbers, nomad Arabs, infidels, and Kalmuks in different geographies. I discuss them in the context of the boundaries of hegemony of the Ottoman Empire. Second, I show how Evliya Çelebi presents the rich folklore of the places he had visited through narratives and parables that describe the beings that we would categorize today as “supernatural,” like gûl-i beyaban, kara koncoloz, obur and cadû. Third, I focus on Evliya Çelebi’s fears of certain natural events. Fourth, I discuss how Evliya Çelebi rarely narrates his fears of God and examine a unique case to show how he uses fear narratives to present his responses to political challenges. Finally, the fifth category, I briefly discuss Evliya Celebi's political view of seventeenth-century Ottoman problems through shifts in his fear narrative about a political incident. By examining these narratives of fear, I discuss how Evliya Çelebi perceived his cosmos, depicted the lands he traveled, and presented his political and personal positions.

Medicine was a brutally competitive occupation in the early modern Ottoman world. The competition on clients, financial gains and professional recognition was endless. This situation bread a range of emotions. In this presentation I will emphasize envy when physician felt they lacked desired medical skill and knowledge colleagues did possess, and jealousy when the existing clientele and recognition were threatened by other healers. The medical reality in the Ottoman world was of diverse medical practices, with numerous types of healers drawing their legitimacy from different origins (hence the preference for the broader term 'medical healers' over the narrower 'physician'). The three main etiologies were the Ottoman adaptation with many additions of Arab-Islam Galenic Humoralism; religious medicine titled 'Prophetic medicine'; and folklore based on indigenous custom. The different medical systems presented themselves as independent, but the reality was considerable and meaningful overlap in knowledge and clinical reality. Furthermore, none could boast superior success and efficiency. In the absence of clear medical hegemony, competition thrived. Many medical healers struggled to make a living. In order to do so, they had to deal with their patients and the patients' relatives. The sijills, the registers from the Ottoman Muslim courts, attest that patients and their families could be very unsatisfied customers who could sue their healers. Even the private healers of the Ottoman elite contended with tensions. In addition to their own professional rivalries, private healers had to deal with the politics of their patients and patrons; their medical career was tied with the success and wellbeing of those they took medical care of. Previous studies discussed the Ottoman medical system in the early modern period, and many more studies analyzed the Ottoman guild systems. Both corpuses of scholarship discussed mechanisms of regulations and standardization as a means of handling the competition. This presentation, however, brings to the forefront the emotional aspect. Based on sijills records, mainly from Istanbul and Jerusalem, chronicles, biographical dictionaries, and copies of imperial decrees (mühimme defterleri) – all from the 16th and 17th centuries, I suggest that 'professional jealousy' explains the attitudes and actions of medical healers toward their colleagues. For instance, thinking of jealousy expounds the personal tone that is sometimes found in claims about morality and faith against medical fraud, trickery and charlatanry. If convincing, this line of thought could be adopted to analyze other competitive occupations.