The Archive and the Repertoire of the Treaty of Karlowitz

Abstract

Abstract:This response argues that Daniel O’Quinn’s Engaging the Ottoman Empire uses a methodology from performance studies in order to show the centrality of oral communication to the reconfigured new world order in the wake of the 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. Taking up Diana Taylor’s framework of the archive and the repertoire, O’Quinn analyzes the treaty negotiations as a scenario in which the text is supplemented with the spatial and embodied vocabularies of performance. In doing so, O’Quinn emphasizes the cosmopolitan potential in the imagining of peace before the Western/Eastern dichotomy calcified.