Speaker
Description
Scholarly attention has largely focused on the European works transmitted, translated, adapted, and integrated into Ottoman intellectual life, such as Gerardus Mercator’s cartographic works, as published and expanded by Jodocus Hondius in Atlas Minor (1607), (1607), and Joan Bleau’s Atlas Maior (1662-1672). However, few studies have explored the pathways through which such works traveled or situated them within the broader forces driving their circulation, particularly the maritime trade networks of emerging capitalist powers.
The seventeenth century saw the Dutch Republic flourish as a capitalist state and a center for both print culture and global trade. While the Dutch Levant Company (Levantse Handel) was primarily a commercial enterprise, its trade routes carried commodities, people, and ideas. Historical evidence suggests that the Dutch Levant Company networks played a role in the circulation of ideas of the Republic of Letters—an intellectual network of correspondences among scholars of the era. This paper examines the Dutch Levant Company’s role in transmitting European knowledge to the Ottoman Empire during the reign of Mehmed IV (1648-1687). Further, it challenges the traditional framing of the Republic of Letters as a solely European phenomenon, demonstrating that Ottoman scholars were active participants in this intellectual landscape.
Short Biography
Mai Lootah is a PhD Candidate at Rice University studying responses to comet apparitions across seventeenth-century Eurasian space. Her research explores moments of encounters and interactions that generate ideas, texts, reactions, and interpretations by following the “pathways” of movement and transmission, overland and maritime, contingent or deliberate. With a primary textual approach, she engages directly with the primary sources in their original languages. She is proficient in classical languages, such as Greek, Latin, and Arabic, and is currently studying modern and Ottoman Turkish. Her current translation projects involve the translation of several texts on medieval and early modern cosmology and astrology from Latin and Ottoman Turkish into English.
Mai’s broader research interests include the medieval and early modern exchange of cosmological, scientific, and philosophical ideas, Latin-Arabic and Latin-Ottoman transmission of knowledge, Christian-Muslim intellectual interactions, the history of astronomy and cultural astronomy, and the representation of the sky in art and poetry. Her work has been recognized with several awards, including the 2024 Lodieska Stockbridge Vaughn Fellowship for Outstanding Achievement and Promise, the 2023 ISSRNC Best Graduate Student Conference Paper Award, and the 2020 American Association of Teachers of Arabic Translation Contest (First Place).
| Keywords | Dutch Levant Company, republic of letters, history of science, Ottoman-European exchanges, maritime routes, early modern cartography |
|---|---|
| ml114@rice.edu | |
| Affiliation | Rice University |
| Position | PhD Candidate |
