Establishing an «Orientalium linguarum Bibliotheca» in 17th-century Vienna: Sebastian Tengnagel and the trajectories of his manuscripts

Abstract

Sebastian Tengnagel was the court librarian of the Imperial Library in Vienna from 1608 until his death in 1636. At the same time, he was an active member of the Republic of Arabic Letters, the circle of European scholars devoted to acquiring and disseminating knowledge of the Orient in early modern Europe. The Austrian National Library holds two groups of texts that can help us understand the complexity of his intellectual endeavours: the corpus of manuscript letters describing his work as an Orientalist and as a librarian, and the collection of Oriental manuscripts built up by Tengnagel. The two sources must be studied together, because each sheds light on the other. Only by interlinking them can we attempt to answer the crucial questions: how and why, in early 17th-century Vienna, did one become an Orientalist? What were the ‘tools of the trade’? This paper is a survey of this material, based upon the interdisciplinary project The Oriental Outpost of the Republic of Letters. Sebastian Tengnagel (d. 1636), the Imperial Library in Vienna, and Knowledge of the Orient carried out at the University of Vienna at the Department of Near East Studies and the Institute for Austrian Historical Research. Through specific case studies it shows how it is possible to reconstruct both the provenance and trajectories of certain books, and the stories of those who carried or studied them.