Silent Teachers

Nil Ö. Palabıyık, Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Queen Mary, University of London, conducts research at the crossroads of intellectual history, manuscript culture, and history of the book. As a postdoctoral fellow funded by the British Academy and the Humboldt Foundation, she worked at the Rylands Library and Institute, Manchester, and the Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität, Munich. Her love of archives took her to the finest libraries in Europe, and led to visiting fellowships at the Scaliger Institute, Leiden, and Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. She published on humanist scholarship, early modern orientalism, and Greek printing in Europe and the Ottoman Empire.

‘Nil Palabıyık’s elegantly written, masterfully researched, and deeply impressive [book] provides a vivid account of the many failures, misfortunes, successes, and accomplishments in the history of early modern European Turkish learning … Silent Teachers is a remarkable lesson in academic rigour, erudite ingeniousness, attentive close-reading, and material sensibility, that critically reassesses key texts, figures, and turning points in the history of European Turkish learning. Through impressive language skills, the author brings together secondary literature in more than nine languages with Arabic, Turkish, Latin, and Persian manuscript material from 28 libraries across 12 countries’ - H-Soz-Kult.‘Nil Ö. Palabıyık’s Silent Teachers is a wonderful scholarly excursion through the challenges of learning Turkish in early-modern Europe and it will most likely become a standard title for intellectual history and cross-cultural interactions between Europe and the Ottoman Empire’ - Revue des études sud-est européennes.‘With her book Palabıyık has done much to open a new field of research’ - Erudition and the Republic of Letters 9 (2024).‘Silent Teachers is a rousing revision to our understanding of the scholarly practices of early modern orientalists, recovering their study of Ottoman Turkish language and texts, and placing it at the center of their scholarship. That Palabıyık conveys this story through a series of compelling vignettes of fascinating individuals, both Ottoman and European, and with an accessible style, only makes it more exciting. Such a corrective to a long-established narrative about the unimportance of Turkish to European scholarship is no doubt made possible by Palabıyık’s mastery of both Ottoman Turkish and Latin language and paleography, on display throughout the text and its numerous appendices’ - Zemin: Literature, Language and Culture Studies.

• Introduction / Chapter One: Earliest printed books on Turkey: Georgievits and Postel on the Turkish language / Chapter Two: The advent of scholarly books on Turkey: Leunclavius’ Ottoman Annals and History, Crusius' Greece under Turkish Rule with Scaliger's Annotations / Chapter Three: First printed grammars of Turkish: Megiser and Du Ryer / Chapter Four: Oriental studies in Leiden: The manuscript Turkish dictionaries of Deusing and Golius / Chapter Five: A fine library: Golius and his Turkish books / Conclusions