The Dragoman Renaissance - by E Natalie Rothman Paperback

About the Book

"This book studies the role of dragomans (diplomatic interpreter-translators) in mediating ethno-linguistic, political, and religious relations between the Ottoman Empire and its European neighbors from ca. 1550 to ca. 1730. It considers both their Istanbul-centered social lives, and how the dictionaries, reports, and visual representations they created were central to the production of Europeanist knowledge about the Ottoman world"--

Book Synopsis

In The Dragoman Renaissance, E. Natalie Rothman traces how Istanbul-based diplomatic translator-interpreters, known as the dragomans, systematically engaged Ottoman elites in the study of the Ottoman Empire--eventually coalescing in the discipline of Orientalism--throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Rothman challenges Eurocentric assumptions still pervasive in Renaissance studies by showing the centrality of Ottoman imperial culture to the articulation of European knowledge about the Ottomans. To do so, she draws on a dazzling array of new material from a variety of archives. By studying the sustained interactions between dragomans and Ottoman courtiers in this period, Rothman disrupts common ideas about a singular moment of "cultural encounter," as well as about a "docile" and "static" Orient, simply acted upon by extraneous imperial powers.

The Dragoman Renaissance creatively uncovers how dragomans mediated Ottoman ethno-linguistic, political, and religious categories to European diplomats and scholars. Further, it shows how dragomans did not simply circulate fixed knowledge. Rather, their engagement of Ottoman imperial modes of inquiry and social reproduction shaped the discipline of Orientalism for centuries to come.

Thanks to generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, through The Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

Review Quotes

The Dragoman Renaissance will make an important contribution to ongoing debates about early modern Orientalism as a complex, contradictory, dialectical process of both cross-fertilization and the ossification of cultural difference. Whereas most studies of Orientalism lean toward investigating Europeans' views of "the Orient," The Dragoman Renaissance demonstrates that cultural brokerage and diplomacy in Ottoman lands operated as a discursive landscape to produce knowledge regarding Ottoman and Muslim culture and history.

-- "Renaissance and Reformation"

About the Author

E. Natalie Rothman is Associate Professor and Chair of Historical & Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She is author of the prizewinning book, Brokering Empire. Visit her website at utsc.utoronto.ca/people/rothman and the Dragoman Renaissance Research Platform at https: //dragomans.digitalscholarship.utsc.utoronto.ca