Gotha Manuscript Talks, Fall 2024

The online series "Gotha Manuscript Talks" is organised by the Gotha Research Library in cooperation with Prof. Dr. Konrad Hirschler (Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, University of Hamburg).
Chair: Dr Feras Krimsti (Gotha Research Library)

October 16, 2024: Contextualizing the Hamburg Divan Manuscript by Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent (1554) with Dr. Christiane Czygan (Orient-Institut Istanbul)

Sultan Süleyman’s Divan

October 16, 2024, 6:15 pm CET

Dr. Christiane Czygan (Orient-Institut Istanbul)

Contextualizing the Hamburg Divan Manuscript by Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent (1554)

Sultan Süleyman (r. 1520–1566) was one of the most prolific Ottoman ruler poets with a hitherto known output of 41 collections of poems. These have remained largely unexplored, particularly the copies that circulated outside of Istanbul. Like other manuscripts of that era, the Hamburg manuscript remained in oblivion in the library vaults of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg for almost a century until Petra Kappert discovered it. It was one of the first illuminated divan copies crafted in the Imperial Palace atelier by outstanding artists.
No stemma has so far been established. In my paper, I establish one and show how this divan copy converged with and deviated from other known and unknown copies. This comparison underscores the specific stance of the Hamburg manuscript, also palpable in the 213 hitherto unpublished poems that form one third of the complete divan. Often deficient in meter, these poems reveal much about Muhibbi’s lyrical difficulties and form a unique treasure trove because they reveal this powerful ruler’s authentic lyrical voice. Some of the unpublished poems are also politically revealing, since they contain martial calls against the Safavids and transfer the inner-Islamic conflicts to the lyrical realm. Editors discarded them – accidentally or not – from later collections of poems. The comparison between the different divan copies singles the Hamburg manuscript out as it also gives voice to hatred, anger, and loneliness.
My paper addresses two questions: First, how was the Hamburg manuscript precisely connected to the eight manuscripts that I have scrutinized for my critical edition? Where are the lacunas in comparison to earlier manuscripts, and what do they reveal about the time and the making of the Hamburg manuscript? Second, what do the many unpublished poems reveal lyrically and politically about the change in the depiction of the ruler?
By contextualizing this divan with Sultan Süleyman’s other divans and the reigning political situation, I shed light on the makers and the making of the Hamburg manuscript.

Christiane Czygan is a researcher at the Orient-Institut Istanbul where she is responsible for Ottoman Literature.  She has a special interest in the dynamics and concepts of Ottoman rulership, and studies modes of their communication in poetry and the press.

October 30, 2024: The Motives behind Oskar Rescher’s Manuscript Trade with Prof. Dr. Güler Doğan Averbek (Marmara University, Istanbul)

October 30, 2024, 6:15 pm CET

Prof. Dr. Güler Doğan Averbek (Marmara University, Istanbul)

The Motives behind Oskar Rescher’s Manuscript Trade

In the 20th century, the German scholar Oskar Rescher (1883–1972) collected, evaluated, and offered hundreds of manuscripts to libraries in the West, especially libraries in Germany. Through his trade activities which lasted almost sixty years, hundreds of oriental manuscripts were added to the collections of more than twenty libraries.
In this talk, the motives behind Oskar Rescher’s manuscript trade will be discussed. In this framework, the environment in Turkey, especially at the time when Rescher was collecting manuscripts, as well as the impact of the reforms implemented after the proclamation of the Turkish Republic on the manuscript market will be discussed. The reforms led to the closure of dervish lodges and madrasas, the unification of educational institutions, an alphabet reform, and the abolition of the Darulfunun. The talk also focuses on Rescher’s awareness of the values and important features of the manuscripts he sent. It touches on his methods for obtaining and selecting manuscripts, his price policies, and his relations with second-hand booksellers.

Güler Doğan Averbek is a faculty member in the Marmara University Department of Turkish Language and Literature. She gained her PhD from Marmara University. She has worked as a researcher at the Research Centre for Islamic History, Art, and Culture (IRCICA) and lectured at Istanbul Medeniyet University and Istanbul 29 May University. She has conducted research on Islamic manuscripts in Turkey, Germany, the Vatican, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Austria.

Oskar Rescher in 1968.

November 27, 2024: Persian Manuscripts from Mongol Baghdad: A Survey with Dr. Bruno De Nicola (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna)

November 27, 2024, 6:15 pm CET

Dr. Bruno De Nicola (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna)

Persian Manuscripts from Mongol Baghdad: A Survey

The fall and subsequent sack of the city of Baghdad by Mongol armies commanded by Hülegü in 1258 CE is a turning point in the history of the city. The general understanding is that after the Mongol conquest, the Abbasid capital underwent a long process of cultural decline affected by a loss of demographics, the destruction of infrastructures and the removal of its cultural centrality in the Islamic world. Accounts of the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols, and especially the destruction of books during the sack of the city, became a topos across Muslim historical accounts in the pre-modern period, particularly among Arab historians. However, more recent research has shown that after the initial sack of the city, cultural activity in the city recovered, if not to a former glory, to the point that, only decades after the surrender of the city, books were being copied, read, and distributed in Baghdad.
This presentation offers a survey of surviving Persian manuscripts produced in Baghdad before, during, and after the Mongol conquest. It highlights their diversity in literary genre, authorship and the scribal habits that characterise these codices. The presentation shows that, in addition to some evidence of a presence of Persian writing in Baghdad before the Mongol invasion of the city, manuscript production in Persian clearly increased once the Mongols appropriated the city in the mid-13th century. Further, this talk addresses the role of Mongol patronage in this cultural shift, noting the close relationship between Persian scribes and Mongol officials. It suggests that despite the initial impact that the Mongol invasion of Baghdad had on the cultural landscape of the city, cultural production and intellectual activities recovered in Baghdad under the direct influence of Mongol rule. Ultimately, this paper argues that while Arabic remained prevalent, Persian flourished as a literary language in Mongol Baghdad, reflecting the city’s integration into the broader Persianate world.

Bruno De Nicola (BA Barcelona, MA SOAS, PhD Cantab) is Research Associate at the Institute of Iranian Studies (Austrian Academy of Sciences) and PI of the FWF-START Prize project NoMansLand.

Mongol prince [Abaqa Ilkhan?] standing near ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn ʿAṭā Malik sitting on a cushion under a pomegranate tree.

December 4, 2024: Reading Arabic Books with a Reuse Lens with Prof. Dr. Sarah Bowen Savant (The Aga Khan University, London)

Corpus-wide text reuse visualisation.

December 4, 2024, 6:15 pm CET

Prof. Dr. Sarah Bowen Savant (The Aga Khan University, London)

Reading Arabic Books with a Reuse Lens

This presentation is based on my forthcoming A Cultural History of the Arabic Book: Digital Explorations of Writerly Practices and Text Reuse (700–1500; Edinburgh University Press, 2025). The book presents the fruits of the ERC-funded KITAB project (2018–2023), and is the first of two volumes produced jointly by its team members. I will define, classify, and discuss evidence for verbatim reuse across an Arabic corpus of 2 billion words. Authors reused texts in myriad ways: they extracted passages from one book to create a new one, as within thematic collections.  They reissued earlier works, reproducing an earlier text in whole or in part. They commented upon earlier works, working line-by-line through earlier texts, or page by page, picking out specific elements for explanation, such as obscure phrases, or particular themes, topics, or people upon which to comment and amplify. Commentarial works also synthesized arguments, concepts, and ideas into more compact statements, for which explanations were offered. These creative practices served as a major engine for the growth of the tradition, but also for its diminishment over time. They occurred in patterned ways that appear graphically within data visualisations now available through the KITAB project’s web application. I will discuss the grammar of these visualisations, as I argue for the relevance of our methods, data, and visualisations for the study of any historical book. Finally, I will discuss KITAB’s recent inclusion within the Digital Library of the Middle East’s online collections, as I chart an agenda for how libraries in particular can take advantage of our data to enhance search functions online, including within their manuscript collections.

Sarah Bowen Savant is a cultural historian specialising in the Middle East and Iran c. 600–1300, a professor of history at the Aga Khan University–Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (AKU–ISMC), and the founding director in 2023 of its Centre for Digital Humanities. Her Digital Humanities project work includes, as PI, the ERC- and Qatar National Library-funded KITAB project, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI), as co-PI with Matthew Miller and Maxim Romanov.