Gotha Manuscript Talks: The Social Effects and Vanishing Traces of Pamphlets and Other Ephemeral Texts in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire

In the seventeenth century, Muslims in the Ottoman Empire became embroiled in a polarizing cultural war over the permissibility of everyday practices like worshipping at saints’ graves, smoking tobacco, and an odd medical procedure called “chickpea cauterization.” This talk traces this widespread religious and political polarization to the rise of a new “communication order,” focusing in particular on the advent of “pamphlets”: short, mobile, and polemical tracts, all copied by hand. The talk paints a new picture of the entire ecosystem of books in the manuscript culture of the early modern Ottoman Empire and focuses in particular on the possibility of tracing ephemeral works in the manuscript record.

Nir Shafir is an associate professor of history at UCSD whose work focuses on the Ottoman Empire/Middle East from 1200 to 1800. He is an occasional contributor and editorial board member of the Ottoman History Podcast and served as its editor in 2018. His first book is titled The Order and Disorder of Communication: Pamphlets and Polemics in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire and came out with Stanford University Press in October 2024.