Ottoman court records have been a treasure trove for social historians for decades. The records kept by the qadi and his scribes have illuminated numerous aspects of Ottoman society from economics to gender relations, from inter-communal relations to artisanal production. Yet, like every historical source, court records have a blind spot. They remain silent on how the courthouse related to the rest of the community as a key space of encounter between the state and the society, between the offical and the local. In contrast to the pretense of neutrality and self-erasure the qadis adopt in keeping court records, their personal notebooks (manuscript macmu’as) are replete with information about their family and social lives, reading habits, and cultural interests. This paper introduces a ‘family archive’ kept by the high-ranking judge Baldirzade Mehmed Efendi (d. 1650) and his son, Dervish Mehmed Efendi (d. 1668) from Ottoman Bursa. The manuscript, passed down from father to son, is full of information about other members of the family, too. In short, the work is a rare example of an early modern family archive. Being a scholarly family, the family also kept extensive records of their correspondence with other ‘ulama,as well as notable legal opinions and court cases. The letters and cases come from the major provinces where the family held posts: cases from Istanbul, Konya, Mecca appear alongside those from Bursa, where the family remained rooted despite their professional peregrinations. Through the family archive, this paper investigates how the Baldirzades compiled and passed down information about various provinces of the Ottoman Empire within the family and beyond, across their social circles in Bursa. Therefore, the manuscript notes of Baldirzades were not only a private family archive, but also a window onto the rest of the empire for residents of Bursa.

Over the past several decades, studies on cultural history of the Ottoman Empire have expanded our understanding of authorship, knowledge, and literacy in the early modern period beyond the strict divide of “high” and “low” cultures. However, as far as the act of writing is concerned, most of the critical textual editions and manuscript-based studies tend to present two discrete spheres: the authors who compose and the scribes who copy, thus espousing an old assumption that scribes were merely means for the mechanical production of texts. My paper calls for a discussion of scribal practices by focusing on a hitherto unexplored culture of compiling the fatwas of the Ottoman chief jurisprudents. I explore how the scribes of chief jurisprudents configured a reference book of jurisprudence, a process that involved collecting, selecting, and classifying thousands of individual fatwa documents, through a close examination of paratextual elements written in Turkish and Arabic from the late fifteenth to the second half of the eighteenth century. Within this context, I foreground a preparatory draft of an ambitious compilation initiative from the eighteenth century by a grandson of the chief jurisprudent Debbagzade Mehmed Efendi (d. 1702). I contend that this vibrant culture of compiling jurisprudential books was informed by a significant question among the scribes of the chief jurisprudents which centered around a particular issue: what kind of reference book compilation provides the readers across the Empire with relevant jurisprudential knowledge while at the same time transmitting the legacy of the chief jurisprudents from reliable sources. Put differently, I argue that beneath the ostensibly impersonal and conventional fabric of textual transmission lie the mediating input of the scribes who were expected to be acquainted with the subtleties of law to perform the craft of compiling fatwas within a collaborative and yet competitive milieu. The paper proposes that exploring the justification and implementation of editorial choices and reference tools for compiling and organizing the fatwas of Ottoman chief jurisprudents can provide us with the ways of understanding the ideals and working methods of the scribes within a manuscript culture. Moreover, it is through reconsidering the position of chief jurisprudents’ scribes that one can also make further steps towards understanding the transmission of law and creating legal authority as it was the culture of compiling fatwas that provided the material support for the integration of fatwas into the doctrinal discourse of a school of Islamic jurisprudence.

Interest in autobiographical writing, social networks, and the culture of reading and readership in the early modern Ottoman world has seen a rise, as diaries, memoirs and mecmuas have increasingly been objects of scholarly analysis. This paper focuses on a mid-17th century mecmua compiled by a certain Ahmed bin Musa. Organized and written over a period of twenty-one months, from 1640 to 1642, it comprises over five-hundred folios and over forty works of varying lengths and contents. From pithy lists of recently dismissed ulema, lists of proverbs, or lists of deaths at the time of writing, to lengthier works of literature, such as the Yusuf u Zulaykha of Hamdi or Layli u Majnun of Fuzuli, to works of various sciences, the mecmua boasts a comprehensive selection. In the concluding section of this sizeable mecmua the compiler notes that, urged by his companion Cildi Çelebi, he wished to have a compilation of a number of useful works so that whenever it would be read, he and his companion would be remembered. What is perhaps even more remarkable than the lengthy autobiographical note on the purposes of the making of this work is the careful organization of the manuscript as an object. Ahmed bin Musa notes that he not only penned this “elegant compilation,” but also prepared its ruling and binding. The texts are organized such that both the text frame and the marginal space and, at times, the triangular thumbpiece are utilized, encouraging the reader to physically interact with the manuscript. In addition to the plethora of the wide array of texts, there are several diagrams representing orbits, eclipses, and different climes of the world, tables, ornamented section separators, and a full-page painting representing the siege of Baghdad by Murad IV. Certainly not a haphazard gathering of different texts, this mecmua shows great care in its organization and writing and boasts its content as well as materiality. A close reading of its texts and images will provide a glimpse into mid-17th century reading culture as reflected through the lens of Ahmed bin Musa and Cildi Çelebi, and highlight their wish to make a mark in their Istanbulite literary circle.

Little is known about Haqvirdi, the former secretary to a Safavid envoy to Northern Germany, who worked for two orientalists studying Persian, Adam Olearius and Jacobus Golius, between 1639 and 1650. Nevertheless, Haqvirdi’s manuscripts and letters, now distributed between Berlin, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Leiden, and Oxford, are an important and mostly unstudied source on the history of oriental studies, casting light on the conditions of oriental philology in non-Ottoman Europe in the seventeenth century, as well as the dynamics of scholarly collaboration across cultures. In particular, Haqvirdi’s manuscripts show how the work of orientalist scholarship was rooted in distinct and identifiable material contexts. This paper will reconstruct and follow these contexts across Haqvirdi’s European career, from Gottorf to Leiden and back. Haqvirdi worked in Persian, Turkish, and Arabic, copied and vocalized manuscripts, compiled dictionaries, translated, and composed original works. He was unlike many other scribal assistants in early modern Europe, in that he performed work far beyond the ability of the scholars who employed him, acting as an intermediary between Western European scholars and Islamic intellectual and literary traditions. In this, Haqvirdi’s work with Olearius and Golius provides a study in contrasts. Olearius, for whom Haqvirdi compiled several works on Persian history and religion, employed him as a cultural and linguistic informant. For Golius, a trained philologist and the most important Western European Arabist of his day, Haqvirdi acted rather as a surrogate reader of manuscripts in Leiden’s collections, performing particular forms of textual work specified in a contract signed by both parties. The varying success of these collaborations demonstrates how the delegation of scholarly work—like the ability to read and translate foreign languages—was a skill, and the differing approaches of Olearius and Golius to their work with Haqvirdi frame a fundamental question about the role of textual mediation in orientalist knowledge production: to what extent is the history of oriental studies in Europe the history of an encounter with Islamic manuscripts?