Oriental Outpost of the Republic of Letters

Hülya Çelik teaches and researches Ottoman and Turkish literature and culture. She is Junior Professor for Turkish Studies at the Ruhr University Bochum, in the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies. Çelik worked in the research projects “Early Modern Ottoman Culture of Learning: Popular Learning between Poetic Ambitions and Pragmatic Concerns” (2011-15) and “The Oriental Outpost of the Republic of Letters. Sebastian Tengnagel (d. 1636), the Imperial Library in Vienna and Knowledge of the Orient” (2018-20), both funded by the FWF (Austrian Science Fund). She was a lecturer in Ottoman and Turkish language and literature at the University of Hamburg and the University of Vienna.Paola Molino teaches Early modern history and libraries and archives history at the University of Padua. She is interested in the history of early modern knowledge, the history of written cultures and libraries. She is the co-author (with Katrin Keller) of Die Fuggerzeitungen im Kontext (Böhlau, 2015) and the author of L’Impero di carta (Viella, 2017). In the last years she has worked on library catalogues and the reorganization of the sciences in the 17th century. Recently, as a Member of the Center for Advanced Studies in Mobility and the Humanities, she has also worked on the mobility of textuality between handwritten and printed news.Chiara Petrolini teaches early modern history at the University of Bologna. She has published on early modern catholicism, Paolo Sarpi, and religious conversions, including Sacre Metamorfosi. Racconti di conversione tra Roma e il Mondo, Rome 2022 (with Vincenzo Lavenia and Sabina Pavone).Claudia Römer is a retired Ottomanist at the University of Vienna. Her research focuses mainly on early modern Ottoman social and economic history, Ottoman diplomatic, and Ottoman historical grammar, comprising periods from Old Anatolian Turkish onward. She has published articles and monographs on these topics, including Osmanische Festungsbesatzungen in Ungarn zur Zeit Murāds III., dargestellt an Hand von Petitionen zur Stellenvergabe. Schriften der Balkan-Kommission, Philologische Abteilung, Bd. 35, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien 1995.Thomas Wallnig is a historian and digital humanist at the University of Vienna. His research focuses on early modern intellectual history and its digital dimension, on which topic he has co-edited Reassembling the Republic of Letters in the Digital Age, 2019 (with Howard Hotson) and Central European Pasts, 2022 (with Ines Peper).

• ContentsList of Figures and TablesAbbreviationsIntroductionHülya Çelik, Paola Molino, Chiara Petrolini, Claudia Römer and Thomas Wallnig1 Sebastian Tengnagel: a Late-Humanist Scholar with a Counter-Reformation BiographyThomas Wallnig2 Sebastian Tengnagel’s CorrespondenceThomas Wallnig3 ‘Dum Clavum Rectum Teneam’: an Orientalist in the Confessional StormChiara Petrolini4 Sebastian Tengnagel as a Pioneer of Oriental StudiesHülya Çelik5 Violence, Friendship and Knowledge: Sebastian Tengnagel’s Encounters and a Wider Republic of LettersChiara Petrolini6 Located and on the Move: the Imperial Library under the Prefecture of Sebastian TengnagelPaola Molino7 Final Note: Twenty-Five/Thirty Years with Sebastian Tengnagel: from an Ottomanist’s View to a Broader PerspectiveClaudia RömerAppendix: Correspondence TableIndex of Names and Places