Nil Ö. Palabıyık, Silent Teachers: Turkish Books and Oriental Learning in Early Modern Europe, 1544–1669

Abstract

The book under review provides a sorely needed corrective to our existing understanding of the place of Ottoman Turkish in early modern orientalist scholarship. By shifting our focus from the printed grammars and translations produced by these orientalists to the study of specific copies of early printed books, these scholars’ Turkish-language manuscripts, and the written traces of their readings, Silent Teachers demonstrates the importance that early modern orientalists attributed to the study of Ottoman Turkish. In the process, it reveals how scholars, in Paris, Leiden, and several German university towns, emulated the methods of their Ottoman counterparts, relying on Turkish commentaries, dictionaries, and other reading aids to explicate difficult Arabic and Persian texts.