The Oriental Outpost of the Republic of Letters

Sebastian Tengnagel, the Imperial Library in Vienna, and Knowledge of the Orient in Early Modern Europe
Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-90-04-72409-9
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 17, 295 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm

Reihe: The History of Oriental Studies

This book explores the life of Sebastian Tengnagel, the imperial librarian who established Vienna's first major collection of Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Hebrew manuscripts. By examining his correspondence and interactions with European scholars and Ottoman subjects, it sheds light on his pursuit of knowledge. Highlighting the significance of his manuscript collection and his political and religious positions, this book provides fresh insights into seventeenth-century Vienna as a center for the acquisition and dissemination of Oriental scholarship.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Çelik, Hülya

Molino, Paola

Petrolini, Chiara

Römer, Claudia

Wallnig, Thomas

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

Abbreviations

Introduction Hülya Çelik, Paola Molino, Chiara Petrolini, Claudia Römer and Thomas Wallnig

1 Sebastian Tengnagel: a Late-Humanist Scholar with a Counter-Reformation Biography Thomas Wallnig

2 Sebastian Tengnagel’s Correspondence Thomas Wallnig

3 ‘Dum Clavum Rectum Teneam’: an Orientalist in the Confessional Storm Chiara Petrolini

4 Sebastian Tengnagel as a Pioneer of Oriental Studies Hülya Çelik

5 Violence, Friendship and Knowledge: Sebastian Tengnagel’s Encounters and a Wider Republic of Letters Chiara Petrolini

6 Located and on the Move: the Imperial Library under the Prefecture of Sebastian Tengnagel Paola Molino

7 Final Note: Twenty-Five/Thirty Years with Sebastian Tengnagel: from an Ottomanist’s View to a Broader Perspective Claudia Römer

Appendix: Correspondence Table

Index of Names and Places

Über Autor(innen)

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 Murads 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).