"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"-- Provided by publisher.
Sebastian Tengnagel was the imperial librarian who created Vienna's first major collection of oriental manuscripts. This book sheds light on his knowledge acquisition, interactions with European scholars and Ottoman subjects, and the political-religious dynamics of early seventeenth-century Vienna.
Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Abbreviations
Introduction
Hülya Ēelik, 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 Tengnagels 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 Ēelik
5 Violence, Friendship and Knowledge: Sebastian Tengnagels 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
Ottomanists View to a Broader Perspective
Claudia Römer
Appendix: Correspondence Table
Index of Names and Places
Hülya Ēelik 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. Ēelik 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 LImpero 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 Murds 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).
