Program in Cultures, Civilizations and Ideas

This article examines the genealogical claims of Nikephoros III Botaneiates, namely his supposed descent from the Phokades and the ancient Roman Fabii, and aims to situate Botaneiates' case within a broader context of exaggerated and contested claims of kinship in medieval Byzantium. While exploring the uses of fictionalized or exaggerated kinship and their reception in contemporary society, it addresses issues of authenticity, proof, and credibility. It argues that Byzantine authors were widely sceptical of audacious genealogical claims and may have been exposed to false claims of kinship more often than previously acknowledged.

Thucydides was very popular among late antique rhetors. His Histories was widely read in rhetorical schools. Since this was the first time many ancients would have encountered Thucydides, how he was studied in schools can influence his overall reception. This paper examines how he was read in schools and suggests how the habits of ancient rhetors may have influenced ancient reading habits.

This article on Callimachus' reception during Byzantium challenges how scholars have constructed Callimachus from Byzantine sources by highlighting the difficulty of extracting Callimachus from his Byzantine context. In this article, I focus on the uses made of him by the twelfth scholar and metropolitan of Athens, Michael Choniates, the last known person to have possessed a copy of Callimachus' Aetia and Hecale.

This book length translation of Bessarion's encomium of Trebizond (mod. Trabzon) makes available for the first time in English this crucial source for the history of the empire of Trebizond and the Greek Pontos. Conforming to the genre of late antique encomia of cities, this text draws heavily on Isocrates, Aelius Aristides, and Libanios to retell the history of Trebizond from Xenophon's Anabasis to the present day. It examines issues such as Byzantine identity and alterity during the fifteenth century, while also providing a valuable descriptions of the Komnenoi and their palace. As such, it is a valuable source not only for late Byzantine history, but also rhetoric and the construction of the past.

I also translate Michael Panaretos' chronicle of Trebizond, our only surviving history of Trebizond. It provides the backbone of what we know about the empire of Trebizond, while also offering the historian key information on Trebizond's relations with its Turkish and Turkmen neighbors. Panaretos's chronicle is notoriously obscure and laconic. This translation provides detailed historical and topographical commentary.

The cardinal Bessarion was a foremost figure of the Italian Renaissance and late Byzantium. However, some of the details of his life are not yet securely established, especially his date of birth. Over the last century, scholars have proposed dates ranging from 1400 to 1408. In this study, I critically interrogate the two most commonly accepted dates (1400 and 1408). In the past, scholars have relied on the age requirements of canon law or the testimony of Italian observers to determine Bessarion’s age. By critically examining the validity of these two assumptions, I reprioritize the evidence, approximating the cardinal’s year of birth
as 1403.

By the turn of the 17th century, the concentration of the ulama's upper echelons in the hands of several powerful families and their associates was already well underway. This process had created resentments both within the ulama and between the ulama and members of other administrative groups, who interpreted this change as a deviation from the supposedly ideal system of the mid-16th century. Owing partly to such resentments, the 17th century's initial decades saw a proliferation in the number of poems of personal invective being produced and consumed by and against members of the ulama. In this paper, several examples from this invective corpus are examined so as to elucidate what such works reveal about how authors from both within and without the ulama reacted to the changing environment around them, and particularly how they used invective as a tool to navigate this era's increasingly insular patronage networks. Though Ottoman invective has received little scholarly attention, it is a mode of writing that, if approached with a full awareness of its rhetorical strategies, has much to tell about the subjectivities of its practitioners. These poems were, to a great extent, composed with eventual oral dissemination in mind, and as such, this paper uses the tools of discourse analysis to unpack how invectives by authors both known – like Nev'îzâde 'Atâyî, Riyâzî, and Nef'î – and anonymous operated as performative acts of aggression and defense within the context of contemporary patronage networks. At the same time, the paper highlights the broader social and cultural context through comparison with similarly engaged texts of the same period, such as the advice literature of Mustafâ 'Âlî and Koçi Beg and Üveysî's "Admonition to Islambol" (Nasîhat-i İslâmbol). Based on the terms of the discourse animating all these works and the concerns that they evidence, the paper argues that the changing composition of the Ottoman ulama and udaba in the early 17th century was felt, by both the winners and losers of the newly emerging structure, as a crisis of Ottoman identity itself, one often linked to an anxiety about the growing power and influence of "outsiders" from a periphery both geographical and cultural in nature. Ultimately, by examining the hitherto neglected corpus of Ottoman personal invective poetry within its historical context, this paper sheds new light on how the learned classes of the time experienced and responded to the tumultuous period in which they found themselves.

Invective (hicv) is the black sheep of Ottoman literature, willfully ignored when it is not actively disdained. Nonetheless, as a mode explicitly “othering” its targets, invective is highly revealing of its authors’ mentalities and latent prejudices. This holds particularly true for the unprecedented flurry of invective produced in and around the Ottoman court in the early 17th century, a time of turmoil among the elite as new varieties of actors began emerging from nontraditional backgrounds, contributing to the increasing factionalization and insularity of already established elite networks. Effectively, Ottoman elite relations during this period were a powder keg of barely constrained sociocultural tensions. In this paper, I address the question of what the invective created in this tense environment reveals about the social and cultural antipathies being fomented by the changes underway. As such, I examine the discourse of the early 17th-century corpus of Ottoman invective – largely centered on the divisive figure of Nef‘î – both on its own and in parallel with contemporary court records, registers of important affairs (mühimme defterleri), and especially advice literature like the Kitâb-ı Müstetâb and Koçi Beg’s treatises. Such documents all testify to a growing concern with "outsiders" (ecnebî) entering various social groups where their like had hitherto been rare or unknown, with the invective corpus registering an especially visceral response to this process. I will demonstrate that this corpus conspicuously utilized a center-periphery dichotomy both spatial (e.g., western vs. eastern provinces) and cultural (e.g., Sunni Muslim vs. non-Sunni/non-Muslim) in nature so as to rhetorically brand its targets as "others" threatening the established Ottoman way. Ultimately, the paper will add to our knowledge not only of a neglected literary mode, but also of how this mode can be used as a unique source to illuminate the social frustrations and tensions animating an era of transformation.

Neyzen Tevfik (1879–1953) was the last gasp of the Turkish iteration of the Islamic tradition of invective humor (hija', hicv). Tevfik wrote poetry spanning a time from Sultan Abdülhamid II's despotism through the Ottoman Empire's collapse and the Republic of Turkey's founding on to the institution of a multiparty system in the 1950s. His work thus offers a unique chance to study how a prevalent mode of Islamic humor adapted to changing sociopolitical conditions and emerging media in an ever globalizing world. My paper examines Tevfik's poetry as an example of how classical Islamic humor changed under modernity's rapid changes while maintaining its distinct identity. In particular, I focus on Tevfik's satires on political figures domestic and foreign over a half century's time – from Abdülhamid II to Hitler, from Mussolini to Adnan Menderes – as well as on his visceral, extemporaneous poems reacting to imposed and imported changes in culture and media. Ultimately, I show how, in the transition from empire to republic in Turkey, Tevfik's work reveals both the obsolescence and the continuance of a long tradition of Islamic humor in the face of modernization. I will also show how the spirit, if not the form, of this tradition – whose last direct representative Tevfik was – has informed the sharp satirical slant of contemporary humor magazines like "Gırgır" and "LeMan": if Tevfik was the classical tradition's last gasp, that gasp served more as a bridge of air than a fit of agonal breathing.

Humorous parodies of astrological calendars are a minor genre in Ottoman literature that have garnered almost no scholarly attention in spite of their immense stylistic and linguistic richness and the insights that they offer into the society of the varied periods in which they were produced. In this paper, I will focus particularly on the latter dimension of Ottoman astrological parodies, examining how such texts can be used as tools for investigating certain contours of Ottoman self-identity inasmuch as they reveal some of the nooks and crannies of how certain marginalized social groups and social and sexual practices were viewed. I will concentrate primarily on a text entitled "General projections for the year of the dog" (Sâl-ı kelb, ahkâm-ı külliyye), an astrological parody which was produced by the poet and royal astrologer Küfrî Bahâyî and which presents a series of humorous and obscene prognostications for the Hijri year 1056, corresponding to 1646/1647 of the common era. While this text will constitute the focus of the paper, I will also draw comparisons and contrasts with other selected examples of this and similar genres – such as the parodic calendar produced by the poet Zâtî and the treatise attributed to various authors, including Lâmi'î Çelebi and Nev'îzâde 'Atâyî, and usually entitled "Treatise of How Things Are" (Nefsü'l-emrnâme) – as well as with examples of the actual astrological calendars being parodied. It is my contention that astrological parodies, through a highly confrontational and sardonic tone that exposes certain antipathies rampant in the Ottoman social order, reveal the presence of an implicit interest in defining "Ottoman-ness" as the purview of an elite class. In line with this, the paper will also touch upon how certain astrological parodies were reproduced at different periods and attributed to different authors, and how this process and the changes it wrought upon the texts in question within the context of a manuscript culture bear witness to an ongoing concern to preserve an elite Ottoman identity in the face of social change. Ultimately, by examining Ottoman astrological parodies as documents indicative of an anxiety of identity, this paper will shed light on how such supposedly "light" and minor genres can in fact prove to be invaluable tools for exploring, both synchronically and diachronically, what it really meant to be Ottoman.

Evliya Çelebi's "Book of Travels" (Seyâhatnâme) is not simply a record of the journeys of a traveler, but also, in many ways, the memoirs of an Ottoman courtier. As such, it records a number of instances of courtiers in the act of performing at courtly gatherings, which were, to a great extent, oral gatherings where products of oral culture were exchanged in a living environment. In this article, I will be focusing on one instance of such a gathering; namely, the section of the third volume of the "Book of Travels" that Robert Dankoff has called "Tall Tales in Aleppo". This section is noteworthy in that it inscribes a back-and-forth oral storytelling exchange – specifically, an exchange of tall tales – that occurred during the course of a gathering of courtiers, Evliya Çelebi being one among them, and their lord. I will analyze this exchange in terms of the oral performative environment typically associated with tall tales, in an attempt to see what this might tell us not only about the oral environment of courtly gatherings, but also about certain of Evliya Çelebi's authorial (and hence, by implication, performative) strategies in composing the "Book of Travels".

Though the Ottoman poet Nef'î (1572?–1635) is often referred to as the master of both panegyric verse (kasîde) and satirical verse (hicv), his satires found in the collection entitled "Shafts of Doom" (Sihâm-ı Kazâ) have been much neglected in critical discourse, generally receiving little more than a brief reference to their scurrilous and profane content, often accompanied by a judgment as to their lack of literary merit. This short study aims to fill in this gap to the extent that it can do so. As such, the focus of this study is upon two groups of satirical quatrains in "Shafts of Doom"; namely, those whose satirical targets are Nef'î's contemporaries Vahdetî and Ganîzâde Mehmed (Nâdirî) Efendi. The quatrains are analyzed in terms of certain of their artistic, discursive, and performative strategies, with particular attention being paid to the light that such an analysis can shed upon the values and characteristics peculiar to Nef'î's satirical art.

In this paper, I will examine two particular descriptions in Evliya Çelebi's Seyâhatname (Book of Travels) of people with physical abnormalities: a man with what may be scaphocephaly in Wallachia, and a boy with hydrocephalus in Şebinkarahisar. I will begin by utilizing the artistic and literary theory of the grotesque to explore descriptive aspects of how Evliya, as a narrator, records the characteristics of such people. Subsequently, I will examine the method through which Evliya locates and thus structures these descriptions within a particular framework; namely, that of the 'aja'ib wa ghara'ib ("wonders and marvels") mode common to medieval and early modern Islamicate travel writing. Finally, I will show how Evliya's use of such descriptions within this modal framework can be seen to complicate this mode.