ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

What’s in a name? Visual Botanical Translations between Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe

• In Event: Translating Technologies and Images: a Context for Textual Knowledge-Making across Early Modern Cultural Spheres

English Abstract

Throughout the seventeenth century, European naturalists grew increasingly interested in both indigenous plants and newly bred garden flowers from the Ottoman Empire. Although early modern Ottomans did not typically include botanical illustrations in their work, this began to change due to scholarly and commercial developments. This talk explores the blossoming of Ottoman botanical illustration through case studies of coffee, flowers, and corals and how they were mutually translated (copied). These practical illustrations were designed to attract customers, encouraging them to purchase newly bred flowers or cultivate popular plants. They were also valuable for identifying and collecting indigenous plants. I argue that because these Ottoman illustrations were often created anonymously in artisans’ workshops, and since they neither conformed to the conventional (read: Western) standards of scientific illustration nor belonged to any recognized artistic genres, European scholars often questioned their authenticity. As a result, they retranslated these images through the work of sanctioned illustrators to make them allegedly more intelligible. Precisely because of that, these illustrations have remained largely overlooked in modern scholarship: although these manuscripts were frequently used and remade for comparison in work-in-progress, they seldom appeared in European naturalists’ publications as reliable depictions without further alterations.

Author

• Duygu Yildirim, University of Tennessee, Knoxville