History of Reading through Manuscript Notes in Ottoman Turkish

What is it about?

It is about the insertion of new groups to the urban culture in eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Among these readers, we have soldiers (janissaries), madrasa students and middle-class bureaucrats. They left notes on their experiences of reading, the names of readers/listeners, the places that reading took place. Apart from such notes, we have song lyrics, poems, conflicts among readers, curses; and also visual notes such as the portraits of heroes, weapons and many kind of doodles.

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Why is it important?

It is important because through investigating these notes on the manuscripts of religious-heroic stories, we reach to the minds of common people, their emotions, thoughts and reactions from the first hand which we cannot read about on the official documents and archival sources. In this way, this study offers a new and intimate first-hand source for different fields of Ottoman history such as the military, cultural, urban histories.

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