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Pamphleteering in a Manuscript Culture: Cheap Books in Motion in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire

Fri, April 1, 1:30 to 3:00pm, Hynes Convention Center, Floor: Level Two, 202

Abstract

We imagine Islamic manuscripts to be luxury objects: large tomes bound in fine leather, gilded, even illustrated. This image only reinforces the prevailing notion that readers in the Islamic world were only an elite coterie. Yet the material record of early modern Islamic manuscripts tells a different story. Millions of manuscripts were produced in the early modern period and most were short, small, and cheap. How were these cheap books circulated and exchanged? What was their life as material objects? Did these books make it into the collections of European and Ottoman libraries? The work of one of the Ottoman Empire’s most prolific manuscript pamphleteers—Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi—helps address these questions. The paper examines the new methods of circulation and authorship Nabulusi used to spread his works from Damascus across the empire and to counter his ideological opponents who used the pamphlet in the seventeenth century to new ends.

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