Abdulghani al-Nabulusi was one of the major Arabic-speaking intellectuals of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, writing hundreds of books and treatises and exerting a deep influence throughout the Ottoman Empire. Despite a number of recent, introductory books about his life, there has yet to be a deep and critical examination of his works. This paper is an attempt to understand one of the more fascinating aspects of his oeuvre—his construction and narration of the self through a variety of genres. The paper integrates a number of unique sources that are rarely matched by other early modern authors. It first tracks how Nabulusi narrated the self through his travelogue-cum-dairy, then relates it to his commentary on Hudai’s revelatory diary, before examining his other works which center on recording daily or weekly actions. For instance, he not only kept track of Friday sermons but also wrote short manuals about the virtues of the days and the weeks. Finally, the paper contrasts this to his official collection of letters which expose a different facet of his authorial personality. I argue that these works represent a reorientation of experience toward quotidian action, aided by the bitter sumptuary battles and a piety movement of the late seventeenth century that aimed at transforming the daily habitus of Muslims. Thus Nabulusi argues for a notion of the self and knowledge anchored in daily observation, introspection, and examination. By doing so, the paper situates the Arabic-speaking Nabulusi in an Ottoman context of autobiography elucidated previously by scholars like Cemal Kafadar and Derin Terzioglu and challenges the literature on Arabic autobiographical writings that overlook the early modern period. Finally, it looks at the development of this different authorial self not only for its own sake but also in terms of the history of knowledge. That is to say how a self rooted in daily observation challenged and changed the type of information that authors in the early modern Middle East collected and examined.

Studies of 18th century Bosnia have focused primarily on the its administration and (para)militarization, describing the region through the ‘border’ or ‘frontier’ paradigm as it relates to the violent imperial encounters of the period. And while militarization created movement and migration, the focus on local military elites, described as disconnected from Istanbul, has also emphasized a bounded, isolated character to this province. Often elided is the rich intellectual and textual production that emerged from a population persistently involved in the cross-imperial trade of metals and minerals despite the constant shifting of military lines. Of particular interest is the rise of historiographic genres that produced new conceptualizations of the relationship between the past, nature and self. In this paper, I will trace firstly, the emergence of a distinct Franciscan chronicling genre in 18th century Bosnia, looking both towards Vienna and Istanbul as imperial centers, and concerned with a disappearing silver trade; but also secondly, the archival practices that arose in Franciscan monasteries during this period. Most often situated along important trade routes and in old mining centres, Franciscan monasteries and Franciscans themselves became important collectors and curators of the mining industry’s legal and transactional documents, mineral samples, mining technology, but also miners’ bodies. Additionally they held the peculiar role of both patrons of mining but also brokers between officials, mining populations and foreign traders due to their authority with largely Catholic mining populations but also their extensive linguistic training and cultural knowledge. Franciscans could straddle differences easily in this large and world-scale economic activity. In this paper, I will examine one chronicle in particular—fra Filip Lastri?’s Commentariolum super Bosnensi provincia—and argue that Lastri?’s text opens up further questions about the relationship between industrial and intellectual production, and specifically about the impact of resource extraction and its derivate industries on writing and ideas about authorship. It is in this context of geological temporalities and proto-capitalist imperial economies that we begin to see the appearance of a distinct history writing that spatializes ‘Bosnia’ as a political entity through the configuration of its territory, people and natural resources. This re-conceptualization of the relationship between people, land and ores had consequences for the perception of the relationship between authorial selves and their social worlds, but also the perception of centre-periphery relations—especially in imagining how a privileged industrial labourer class was supposed to communicate with their officials across such a vast empire.

The meager historiography of Ottoman alchemy has been to-date dominated by studies on the translations of Paracelsian texts from the Latin into Arabic and Turkish in the late seventeenth century and on the “the new chemical medicine” (al-tibb al-jadid al-kimyawi) movement precipitated by these translations. This singular focus on an admittedly important but also brief episode in the transmission of knowledge from the West to the Islamic world has led to a general disinterest in a wealth of texts written in later periods that follow the classical Islamic tradition, and thus left many a significant question unanswered: What was the nature of the production of knowledge in the field of alchemy in the eighteenth-century Ottoman world? How did Ottoman alchemist-authors in the long eighteenth century situate their works within the genealogy of alchemical knowledge? How do alchemical texts from this period reflect on the social and cultural milieu in which they were produced? The present talk will concentrate on the last question in particular and attempt to provide some answers through a reading of Ottoman works on alchemy as “ego documents.” Much of the discussion will revolve around the collection of writings left behind by the Syrian alchemist, poet, and sage Osman Bilani, whose life spanned the middle and the second half of the eighteenth century. I will argue that the autobiographical elements in Osman Bilani’s alchemical writings exhibit marked differences from those found in earlier Ottoman works treating the same branch of knowledge, especially with respect to the degree in which the author’s voice is self-revelatory. That this points to changing attitudes towards the relationship between the author, text, and audience in the long eighteenth century, rather than the possible idiosyncrasies of Osman Bilani as an author, will be revealed by additional evidence from a number of other alchemical works that also date from the period under consideration.

The Ottoman katib presents a real paradoxical case for the historian. He is the author of a vast body of archival material, he is everywhere in that sense but as the subject of historical inquiry he often remains invisible. The transformation of the political cadres, from domination by the seyfiye (‘people of the sword’) to the prominence of the kalemiye (‘people of the pen’) still remains a well-established aspect of late seventeenth-century Ottoman history. In spite of the increasing visibility of a distinct community of scribes in the political, diplomatic and cultural life of the Empire, not much is known about the Ottoman scribe and the community of scribes in this period. Based on my study of the seventeenth-century Ottoman scribal culture, I argue that beginning from the mid-seventeenth century, “scribal literacy” signifying the combination of certain literate/literary skills required from scribes, shifted to the centre of Ottoman political discourse, and eventually gained critical value as an essential political capital. In this paper I will discuss examples from a number of literary genres including the kaside, the münazara, and the kalemiye. These different literary products mirror scribes’ constant preoccupation with the quality of their discourse, which was critical to define their intellectual identity and assert their indispensability as political actors. These pre-existing genres were resuscitated and restructured to create a discursive world where the katib, as the embodiment of literary - edibane skills, was transformed into being the only figure to introduce a degree of sophistication to the political realm.

The Ottoman Empire’s “middle years”—i.e. the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—currently yield the most provocative, new historiographic treatments as scholars seek to debunk theories of decline and stagnation and search for narrative models that rely neither on cataclysmic conquest nor increasing Western dominance for coherence. Still, despite greater attention paid to this period and the gradual awakening of the field as a whole to the problem of defining imperial trajectories according to a rise and fall thesis, most recent work fails to provide a robust alternative. In this paper I will argue that one way out of this difficulty is finally to pay close attention to the shifts in language used by the Ottoman elites themselves as they sought to categorize and administer their realms. As “men of the pen” increasingly replace “men of the sword” as addressees in imperial edicts, a new kind of literacy defines the ambit of Ottoman authority. This literacy corresponds to a shift from the tax register to the register of complaint (?ikayet defterleri) as one of the dominant genres in the imperial archive. Combining the tools and strategies of discourse analysis with the consideration paid by social history to patterns of behavior and slow processes of change, I will explore two documentary genres that heretofore have been read in isolation: treatises written in the style of adab or ahlak as ethical manuals reflecting on the qualities of a just ruler; and various hükümet or orders/judgments issued from the sultan’s divan addressing practical matters of governance and reflecting the increasingly vocal (or increasingly archived) grievances of his subjects. The former, loosely collected under the nasihatname rubric, gradually incorporated the latter in a move away from the characteristic style of advice manuals and toward a sophisticated mode of self-criticism and analysis. The new imperial “literacy”, crafted in response to a Eurasian seventeenth-century crisis, assumed archival knowledge and yet simultaneously broke with traditional genres. By reading these genres in conjuncture, I hope to trace how the discursive strategies of administrative elites shifted from serving merely as labels or categories of imperial domains toward providing the forum for a project of self-fashioning and identity formation.