Doctoral Dissertation Research: Travel, Botany, and Naturalism in the Ottoman Empire

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

This doctoral research explores the role of travel as a method of acquiring knowledge in the early modern Ottoman Empire. While travel has long been seen as a fundamental motor of Western thought, it has not received similar recognition in Ottoman historiography. Surviving manuscript collections suggest that in the late seventeenth century travel writing became increasingly popular among Ottoman intellectuals and their travelogues record indirect pilgrimage routes to Mecca, in which authors investigated and discussed miracles, wonders, and flora. The present study will explore how this new genre of writing transformed travel into a knowledge-making practice that emphasized direct experience and naturalistic depiction. The origins and impact of this epistemological transformation will be investigated through research in the manuscript libraries and archives of Istanbul from January to November 2013. This research applies current methods and questions developed by historians of science to the field of Ottoman studies, which has been traditionally dominated by social and economic history approaches. The field of Ottoman history of science is both vastly under-researched and has yet to adopt advances in science and technology studies from the past thirty years. Using recent work on seventeenth-century history of science in Europe as a reference point, the study addresses such topics as the history of scientific observation, the scientific self, and the role of wonders and marvels.