{"title":"Antiquarianism or Taḥqīq? Guillaume Postel’s Reading of Abu’l-Fidā’s Taqwīm al-Buldān","authors":"Maria Vittoria Comacchi","doi":"10.1163/15700658-bja10071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700658-bja10071","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This paper retraces Guillaume Postel’s (1510–1581) initial acquisition of a copy of Taqwīm al-Buldān (The Arrangement of Countries), a geographical treatise of the historian and geographer Abu’l-Fidā (672/1273–732/1331) and offers an analysis of his reading of the text through a careful examination of the manuscript itself, hitherto ignored by scholarship. After the introduction and the examination of the manuscript, I will discuss the use Postel made of the Arabic geography in his cosmographical writings advancing the hypothesis that Postel’s cosmography somehow shares a similar approach to Abu’l-Fidā with respect to the concept of “tradition.” Finally, by offering an analysis of a parallel to Postel’s appropriation of Taqwīm al-Buldān, i.e., Hajji Ahmed’s cordiform map, I will propose a new way to re-contextualize the surge of cosmographical works in sixteenth-century Europe, as, at least in part, a product of post-Mongol taḥqīq.","PeriodicalId":44428,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Modern History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46388883","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“A Bank of Trust”: Legal Practices of Ottoman Finance Between Empires","authors":"Ellen M. Nye","doi":"10.1163/15700658-bja10070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700658-bja10070","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000How agreements were maintained and enforced beyond state-backed systems is among the least understood aspects of Ottoman legal history. This article reveals how merchants’ engagement with Ottoman state finance intertwined private and state-backed legal practices through a letter-book written entirely in Ottoman Turkish belonging to a seventeenth-century English merchant, Peter Whitcomb, who provided financial services to Ottoman officials across the empire. As a rare example of surviving early modern mercantile correspondence in Ottoman Turkish, Whitcomb’s letters to distant officials expose Ottoman financial epistolary culture and a wide range of alternative methods of dispute resolution. By combining these letters with court records, this article shows how Ottoman finance’s layers of devolved authority themselves relied on a range of legal practices that encompassed a language of reciprocity and reputation, established Ottoman documentary forms, intercessions on an individual’s behalf, appeals to elites, petitions to the grand vizier, and appearances in Ottoman sharīʿa courts. The capacity of Ottoman state finance to incorporate a foreigner like Whitcomb into its fiscal apparatus through this breadth of legal practices further suggests that we should revisit domestic narratives of competitive early modern state formation to include inter-imperial actors.","PeriodicalId":44428,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Modern History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48209187","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Afterlife of Eurasian Long-distance Correspondence: From Jesuit Epistle to European Print","authors":"Yuval Givon","doi":"10.1163/15700658-bja10063","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700658-bja10063","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article carefully examines the long trajectory of a seventeenth-century letter in order to contribute to scholarship on the circulation and reproduction of information from Asia in European print in the early modern period. The letter was written by the Jesuit missionary and traveler Johann Grueber (1623–1680) to his colleague in Rome, the renowned scholar Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680). Spanning over a century of circulation and moving between the original context of Chinese missionary work in which the letter was composed and the scholarly networks throughout which it later circulated in Europe, the article elucidates the spread and evolution of Eurasian long-distance information in the early modern period, particularly between manuscript and print. It also examines how writers and publishers in Europe made selective use of the information within those manuscripts in their printed works, from the seventeenth century into the era of Enlightenment. The article thereby offers insights into questions of composition, authorship, reproduction, and distribution in the making of long-distance Eurasian information exchanges during the early modern period.","PeriodicalId":44428,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Modern History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49473927","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Last Embassy: The Dutch Mission of 1795 and the Forgotten History of Western Encounters with China, written by Tonio Andrade","authors":"P. Crossley","doi":"10.1163/15700658-12342726","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700658-12342726","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44428,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Modern History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41257309","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"People of the Iberian Borderlands: Community and Conflict between Spain and Portugal, 1640–1715, written by David Martín Marcos","authors":"T. Herzog","doi":"10.1163/15700658-12342722","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700658-12342722","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44428,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Modern History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48746027","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Italy by Way of India. Translating Art and Devotion in the Early Modern World, written by Erin Benay","authors":"S. Ditchfield","doi":"10.1163/15700658-12342724","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700658-12342724","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44428,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Modern History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44762654","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Empire of Eloquence: The Classical Rhetorical Tradition in Colonial Latin America and the Iberian World, written by Stuart McManusThe Globe on Paper: Writing Histories of the World in Renaissance Europe, written by Giuseppe Marcocci","authors":"R. Calis","doi":"10.1163/15700658-12342727","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700658-12342727","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44428,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Modern History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47487996","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Slave and the Scholar: Representing Africa in the World from Early Modern Tripoli to Borno (N. Nigeria)","authors":"Rémi Dewière","doi":"10.1163/15700658-bja10061","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700658-bja10061","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The Borno sultanate in present-day Nigeria was an early modern Islamic state at the crossroads of regional, transregional, and global networks. Sahelian pilgrims, North African scholars, European slaves, Saharan nomads, and Turkish mercenaries would travel to its capital, connecting it with West Africa, the Mediterranean World, and the Middle East. How do we assess Borno’s integration in the global early modern world from a plural perspective, both from the inside and the outside? Using the narratives of Aḥmad b. Furṭū, a sixteenth century Borno scholar living in the sultan’s court, and of Pierre Girard, a French slave in seventeenth century Tripoli, Libya, I will interrogate the idea of globality from a Borno-centered representation of the world. The mental mapping of these narratives raises a yet unanswered question in the field of early modern history: How can we conceive global history from an African point of view?","PeriodicalId":44428,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Modern History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47629715","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1163/15700658-02701-02000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700658-02701-02000","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44428,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Modern History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136126956","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Portuguese Mercenary Networks in Seventeenth-Century India: An Experiment in Global Microhistory and its Archive","authors":"Giuseppe Marcocci","doi":"10.1163/15700658-bja10058","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15700658-bja10058","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Thousands of runaways left the Portuguese empire during the early modern period, but very little is known about the lived experience of this diverse group of individuals after they fled. This article questions the framework of analysis that reduces such a complex social phenomenon to the overarching category of “informal empire,” while testing the hypothesis that the issue of the archive lies at the core of the practice of global microhistory. A set of primary sources in Portuguese, Dutch, English, Marathi, and Persian is analyzed at close range to reconstruct the choices, motivations, and hesitations of a specific group of “Portuguese” – mostly dark-skinned mestiços of modest origin – who served as mercenaries in north-western Deccan. I argue that studying the networks of these mercenaries ultimately reveals localized forms of endurance and adaptation to rapid and disruptive changes brought about locally by imperial rivalry and long-distance commerce.","PeriodicalId":44428,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Early Modern History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45553138","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}