Participant Info

First Name
Nil
Last Name
Palabiyik
Affiliation
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität
Website URL
Keywords
Book history, printing culture, European intellectual history, history of Orientalism, Turkish learning in Europe, Ottoman manuscripts, Renaissance collections of Oriental texts, scholarly libraries
Additional Contact Information

Personal Info

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About Me

Currently based at LMU Munich, I am a historian of early modern Europe’s intellectual legacy. My Alexander von Humboldt Foundation-funded project investigates the interest of humanist scholars in Ottoman Turkish through readers’ marks, annotations and marginalia in 16th- and 17th-century books and manuscripts that circulated in Europe. 

I hold an MA in English from the University of York and a PhD in History from Royal Holloway, University of London. I held fellowships at the Scaliger Institute, Leiden University and Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. I was British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Manchester prior to my arrival in Germany.

About my research:

Turkish was the official language of the Ottoman Empire, which dominated the Eastern Mediterranean throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet modern scholarship has largely neglected the European interest in the Turkish language during this time period. The findings of my project will provoke a paradigm shift in our understanding of Renaissance Orientalism by showing that, far from being marginal, Turkish occupied a prominent position in understanding the languages and the literatures of the East.

My project considers the study of Turkish through the use and reception of manuscripts that were brought to Western Europe from the Ottoman Empire, and the printed and unpublished dictionaries, grammars and phrasebooks of Turkish produced by Orientalist scholars. As the first inquiry into Turkish learning in early modern Europe, the outputs of the project are expected to become a standard works of reference that will challenge many of the current misconceptions.

Recent Publications

‘Justus Raphelengius’s Latin translation of Turkish folk tales’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, forthcoming in 2019 (12,886 words).

Attitudes towards the Nestorian Controversy in Seventeenth-Century Constantinople: The Jesuit Reaction to Nikodemos Metaxas’s Greek editions’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, special issue, forthcoming in 2018 (10,606 words).

‘The Last Letter from Étienne Hubert to Joseph Scaliger: Oriental Languages and Scholarly Collaboration in Seventeenth-Century Europe’, LIAS: Journal of Early Modern Intellectual Culture and its Sources, forthcoming September 2018 (13,568 words).

‘Redundant Presses and Recycled Woodcuts: The Journey of Printing Materials from London to Constantinople in the Seventeenth Century’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 110.3 (2016): 273–298.

‘An Early Case of the Printer’s Self-Censorship in Constantinople’, The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 16.4 (2015): 381–404 [editor’s choice].

‘The Beginnings of Printing in the Ottoman Capital: Book Production and Circulation in Early Modern Constantinople’, Studies in Ottoman Science 16.2 (2015): 3–32.

Media Coverage
Country Focus
Expertise by Geography
France, Germany, Mediterranean, Middle East, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Western Europe
Expertise by Chronology
Pre-17th century, 17th century, Early Modern
Expertise by Topic
Book History, Libraries & Archives