Speakers
Description
In recent decades, historians have increasingly recognised that the creation and dissemination of knowledge extends beyond the works of published authors and the production and circulation of books. Early modern knowledge was recorded, transmitted and stored in a variety of media, including letters, travelogues, working papers, lists, notebooks, diaries and drawings. Moreover, knowledge was not the preserve of particular groups, nor was it geographically limited. Early modern travellers, such as itinerant students, merchants and diplomats, significantly contributed to the continuous exchange of information and the transfer of knowledge across cultural boundaries. Finally, the creation and dissemination of knowledge did not exclude individual experience, but was embedded in the personal accounts of ego-documents.
Our roundtable brings together four scholars to discuss their own research in the light of these questions. They all work on manuscript sources from a comparative and global perspective, involving travel and knowledge transfer between European regions as well as between European and non-European countries. The aim of the roundtable is to bring together concrete cases of research that test, validate and modify the general assumptions described above for specific textual forms and materials, and to facilitate a conversation about the state of the art, with its problematic aspects and possibilities for further development.
• Alicja Bielak’s research centers on the notebooks of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth students at Western European universities. Taking into account their social status, religion and future professions, she will argue that in the notebooks even short, seemingly isolated sentences, out of context, proved to be effective conduits, leading the researcher to specific themes or concerns that occupied the students’ minds – impossible to find in the official curricula.
• Gábor Förköli examines to what extent the prescriptive and collective aspects of early modern notetaking methods enabled students to construct a self-image via excerpts from their readings and personal notes. He will contend that their concern about identity can be grasped through their rising awareness for confessional issues as well as their increasing curiosity for the historia litteraria of their homeland as part of a broader Republic of Letters.
• Sooyong Kim focuses on Ottoman literati practices in the 17th century, examining issues of canon and its legacies and the role of multilingualism in that regard, with a focus on prose genres, including the autobiographical. He will discuss how health and illness are represented in early modern ego-documents, particularly from an Ottoman Muslim male perspective. The focus of his discussion will be on how Evliya Çelebi in his Book of Travels (ca. 1683) records his recovery from long-term impotence and the uniqueness of that.
The roundtable discussion will be organized in three phases.
First, the panellists will briefly present the materials they are working with in 5-7 minutes. Their description may cover one or more of the following points:
• What materials do you work with? What made you interested in them?
• What skills are needed to study your materials? Did you have these skills or did you have to learn them?
• What has your research contributed to the field and how do you think it has changed it?
Second, the panellists will discuss among each other for 25-30 minutes.
• How do you think your studies compare with each other? Where do you see differences, where do you see similarities? Is there any continuity between the materials studied, such as commonplace books or lecture notes, and the travel-related ego-documents?
• How would you describe the “status” of handwritten ego-documents compared to printed sources? How would you describe the role of “material” aspects in your studies?
• To what extent can we say that these documents are personal? Were they designed for personal or collective use? Are they based on individual experiences and observations or on other textual sources? To what extent are their compilers able to overwrite inherited stereotypes?
• What are the main systems used to organise knowledge in manuscripts? Should we emphasise cultural differences or transcultural universals in methods of knowledge management? For example, can we assume the existence of ars apodemica outside Europe?
Third, in the remainder of the time, the chair will open up the discussion to audience participation.
Short Biography
Alicja Bielak is a post-doctoral researcher at the Polish Academy of Sciences, and currently, she is conducting her research within the ERC Project, “From East to West, and Back Again. Student Travel and Transcultural Knowledge Production in Renaissance Europe” (2020-2026) led by Prof. Valentina Lepri. Between 2018 and 2021 she was a lecturer at the University of Warsaw. She is a PI of a team project Poet, Physician, and Diplomat at the Court of the Radziwiłł Family. Critical Edition of Daniel Naborowski’s Correspondence (NPRH financed by the Polish Ministry of Sciences and Higher Education, 2022-2027). She also serves as a Communications Officer of the Society for Emblems Studies and Editorial Assistant of the “Emblematica: Essays in Word and Image” Journal.
Gábor Förköli is a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project “From East to West, and Back Again: Student Travel and Transcultural Knowledge Production in Renaissance Europe” at the Polish Academy of Sciences. Under the joint supervision (cotutelle) of the Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris 4) and the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest, he defended his PhD dissertation on the Central European reception of 17th-century French political thought in 2017. Between 2014 and 2015, he worked as junior researcher in the Humanism in East Central Europe Research Group, which operated in the framework of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and of the Eötvös Loránd University. His interests include political literature, religious anthropology, history of rhetoric, and the uses of excerpts and common place books in early modern handwritten culture.
Sooyong Kim is an Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Koç University. His current research focuses on Ottoman literati practices in the 17th century, examining issues of canon and its legacies and the role of multilingualism in that regard, with a focus on prose genres, including the autobiographical. His recent publications include: “The Poet Nefʿī, Fresh Persian Verse, and Ottoman Freshness” (2022), a re-assessment of early Ottoman engagement with Indian-style Persian poetry; and “Revisiting Multilingualism in the Ottoman Empire” (2021), a critical survey, co-authored with Orit Bashkin, that maps out the ways in which practices across different communities and eras interacted, intersected, and competed with one another. He has also published two books: The Last of An Age (2018), an account of poetic canon-making in the 16th century and An Ottoman Traveller, a co-translation with Robert Dankoff of selections from Evliya Çelebi’s 17th-century of Book of Travels.
Matthias Roick is currently postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for the History of Renaissance Knowledge of the Polish Acadamy of Sciences in Warsaw. He works within the framework of Prof. Valentina Lepri’s ERC project “From East to West, and Back Again: Student Travel and Transcultural Knowledge Production in Renaissance Europe (c. 1470 - c. 1620)”. After his PhD in European history at the EUI in Florence, he worked at the University of Göttingen. From 2014 to 2021, he was an affiliated fellow of the Lichtenberg Kolleg, Göttingen’s Instititute for Advanced Studies, and Freigeist Fellow for the History of Ethics at the University of Göttingen. From 2022-2024, he worked as PASIFIC (MSC) Fellow on a project on early modern friendship.
He is the author of Pontano’s Virtues. Aristotelian Moral and Political Thought in the Renaissance (2017) and the co-editor of two recently published collected volumes, Teaching Ethics in Early Modern Universities, 1500-1700 (2021), together with Valentina Lepri and Danilo Facca, and Vera Amicitia. Classical Notions of Friendship in Renaissance Thought and Culture (2022), with Patrizia Piredda. Matthias has also widely published on different aspects of early modern ethics and virtue theory, including pieces on animal ethics, Petrarca’s moral self-fashioning, the virtue of magnificence, and the relationship between literature, collection history, and ethics, and early modern game culture.
| Keywords | Ego-document, knowledge transfer, notebooks, travelogue |
|---|---|
| alicja.bielak@ifispan.edu.pl | |
| Affiliation | Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology |
| Position | Assistant Professor |
