Forgotten Experts: Astrologers, Science, and Authority in the Ottoman Empire, 1450–1600 - Couverture rigide

Şen, A. Tunç

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1503642658 ISBN 13 : 9781503642652

Editeur : Stanford University Press, 2025

Synopsis

Forgotten Experts offers a history of Ottoman court astrologers and traces their shifting authority and prestige over the long sixteenth century. These individuals served the Ottoman court with their expertise in mathematical, astronomical, and astrological sciences, distinguishing themselves from other occult practitioners and esoteric specialists. While both prophecy and prognostication are attempts to map the terrain of the future, the astrologers' work did not claim spiritual weight as a prophecy but relied instead on methods of prediction developed from data and patterns elaborated through technical and scientific writings. Drawing on extensive manuscript and archival records written in Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and Arabic, A. Tunç Şen writes a history of science, state formation, and bureaucracy within the overarching tale of Ottoman imperial formation and protocols. He invites readers to follow Ottoman court astrologers' fluctuating careers as practitioners of a contentious science and shows how this class of learned individuals constructed its scientific authority despite numerous cultural, societal, and epistemic challenges. In understanding the expertise of court astrologers, we gain insight into the intricate social relations established and maintained between the men of knowledge and the men of rule, between expertise and statecraft, in the early modern Ottoman imperial context.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

A. Tunç Şen is Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Stanford University Press
• Date d'édition: 2025
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1503642658
• ISBN 13: 9781503642652
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 352
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible