Between European and Ottoman: Turn of the 18th Century

 

By the nineteenth century, philhellenic Europeans had appropriated the classical Greek world as their distinct cultural patrimony. However, sources composed in the late 1600s and early 1700s by Ottoman dignitaries, Greek Orthodox intellectuals, and French and English travelers reveal a more fluid period when the Greco-Roman tradition exerted an influence on the perceptions all these (sometimes overlapping) groups had of themselves and one another. Greek, Ottoman, French, and English literary texts, archival records, and visual sources thus reveal the cross-cultural currents and ties connecting members of the Ottoman intelligentsia with their counterparts in Paris and London in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Lecture given by Karen Leal, Kluge Fellow. Speaker Biography: Karen Leal is a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress who was educated at Harvard completing her dissertation in 2003. She received a post-doctoral award at the Packard Humanity Center and served as assistant professor at St. John's University in New York. Her research interests have focused on the perception of minorities within the Ottoman Empire. Leal's Kluge project examines the Ottoman understanding of the Empire's classical heritage.