Work in Progress - NEW TOPIC - 'Martin Crusius (1526-1607) and the Discovery of Ottoman Greece''

NB: There has been a change of subject for this week's talk:

Richard Calis (Utrecht University) - 'Martin Crusius (1526-1607) and the Discovery of Ottoman Greece'

In the course of the sixteenth century, Martin Crusius (1526-1607), professor of Greek at the University of Tübingen and known as postclassical Europe’s first self-professed philhellene, compiled the period’s richest record of Greek life under Ottoman rule. For over a decade, he maintained a lengthy correspondence with the Greek Orthodox Patriarch. For more than forty years, he interviewed dozens of itinerant Greek Orthodox Christians about their culture and religion; and from every corner of the Mediterranean he collected and annotated hundreds of Greek books and manuscripts. The evidence he thus accumulated yielded an astoundingly broad portrait of the Ottoman Greek world, full of colour and perspective, rich in details and experiences. It was a body of knowledge that, although now largely forgotten, was unparalleled in its day and would remain so for centuries to come: no less a historian as Edward Gibbon cited Crusius in his own great historical works. 

My paper explores how Crusius’s extraordinary scholarly project took shape. It focuses on the dozens of Greek Orthodox Christians who—while collecting alms to ransom captured family members—visited Crusius in his Tübingen home and informed him about their life and culture. Through analyses of these conversations, I show that ‘discovering’ Ottoman Greece from afar was possible for Crusius through interaction with books and paintings; through moments of collaborative reading; through listening carefully to his guests; through observation and other forms of visualization; and even by tasting Greek food. His scholarship built on a hybrid hermeneutics in whose method practices of reading and observing and first-hand and second-hand experiences merged. 

Richard Calis is a cultural and intellectual historian of the early modern world. His interests lie in the early modern history of knowledge and science, and the ways in which people make sense of the world around them. He is currently an Assistant Professor in Intellectual History at Utrecht University. Previously, he was a Research Fellow in History at Trinity College, Cambridge and obtained his PhD from Princeton University. His work has appeared in Renaissance Quarterly and Past and Present, and is forthcoming with The English Historical Review. His first book, The Discovery of Ottoman Greece: Knowledge, Encounter, and Belief in the Mediterranean World of Martin Crusius (1526-1607), will appear in 2024 with Harvard University Press.

The Work in Progress seminar explores the variety of subjects studied and researched at the Warburg Institute. Papers are given by invited international scholars, research fellows studying at the Institute, and third-year PhD students.

ATTENDANCE FREE ONLINE OR IN PERSON WITH ADVANCE BOOKING.