Back to the future: a belated history of ‘new’ science in the Ottoman Empire
What happens when fragmentary and too much information is flowing across the world? This article sketches the emergence of one such informational flow through the ubiquitous concept of ‘new medicine’ in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire in a historiographical corrective. Rather than presenting...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Cambridge University Press
2024-01-01
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| Series: | BJHS Themes |
| Online Access: | https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S2058850X24000092/type/journal_article |
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| author | Duygu Yıldırım James Poskett |
| author_facet | Duygu Yıldırım James Poskett |
| author_sort | Duygu Yıldırım |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | What happens when fragmentary and too much information is flowing across the world? This article sketches the emergence of one such informational flow through the ubiquitous concept of ‘new medicine’ in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire in a historiographical corrective. Rather than presenting it as a unified category, I argue that Ottoman physicians used ‘new’ as a loose, multivalent and discursive term whose potentiality lay in its malleability for future use. Ready to bear any contingent meaning at a certain point in the future, the ‘new’ became a strategic tool to cope with the uncertainties evoked by early modern globalization and local epistemic crisis. It also helped Ottoman scholars and physicians develop a tentative design for how much information, and of what sort, was just enough for the learned and laypeople to know during precarious times. I further discuss the fact that since the Ottoman motivation for the usage of the notion of the ‘new’ is without a decisive motive, it still haunts our historiographical debates about what was truly new about Ottoman science. |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj-art-81d3e39cb81246ad8084b82baf0e11fb |
| institution | Kabale University |
| issn | 2058-850X 2056-354X |
| language | English |
| publishDate | 2024-01-01 |
| publisher | Cambridge University Press |
| record_format | Article |
| series | BJHS Themes |
| spelling | doaj-art-81d3e39cb81246ad8084b82baf0e11fb2025-01-16T21:52:28ZengCambridge University PressBJHS Themes2058-850X2056-354X2024-01-01916918210.1017/bjt.2024.9Back to the future: a belated history of ‘new’ science in the Ottoman EmpireDuygu Yıldırım0James PoskettDepartment of History, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USAWhat happens when fragmentary and too much information is flowing across the world? This article sketches the emergence of one such informational flow through the ubiquitous concept of ‘new medicine’ in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire in a historiographical corrective. Rather than presenting it as a unified category, I argue that Ottoman physicians used ‘new’ as a loose, multivalent and discursive term whose potentiality lay in its malleability for future use. Ready to bear any contingent meaning at a certain point in the future, the ‘new’ became a strategic tool to cope with the uncertainties evoked by early modern globalization and local epistemic crisis. It also helped Ottoman scholars and physicians develop a tentative design for how much information, and of what sort, was just enough for the learned and laypeople to know during precarious times. I further discuss the fact that since the Ottoman motivation for the usage of the notion of the ‘new’ is without a decisive motive, it still haunts our historiographical debates about what was truly new about Ottoman science.https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S2058850X24000092/type/journal_article |
| spellingShingle | Duygu Yıldırım James Poskett Back to the future: a belated history of ‘new’ science in the Ottoman Empire BJHS Themes |
| title | Back to the future: a belated history of ‘new’ science in the Ottoman Empire |
| title_full | Back to the future: a belated history of ‘new’ science in the Ottoman Empire |
| title_fullStr | Back to the future: a belated history of ‘new’ science in the Ottoman Empire |
| title_full_unstemmed | Back to the future: a belated history of ‘new’ science in the Ottoman Empire |
| title_short | Back to the future: a belated history of ‘new’ science in the Ottoman Empire |
| title_sort | back to the future a belated history of new science in the ottoman empire |
| url | https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S2058850X24000092/type/journal_article |
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