Two manuscript traditions are preserved at the Gotha Research Library: one Western or European, the other one Asian and Middle Eastern.
For research on early modernity this means that the Research Library is a place for encounter, where both traditions shed light on each other.
You will find manuscripts, materials, and archival documents next to each other on the same shelves, communicating silently with each other.
My favourite objects are two eighteenth-century travelogues. These travel accounts were written by two brothers from the Maronite Christian community in Aleppo. The older brother travelled to Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. The younger brother was a monk and, early in his career, he travelled through Europe, visiting its Catholic courts. His goal was to collect alms.
Both accounts document in fascinating ways how two individuals from the same family moved in two different systems of patronage - one Ottoman, the other French. They also show that travel literature was extremely popular, not only in eighteenth-century Europe.
The collection of Arabic, Ottoman and Persian manuscripts at the Gotha Research Library is a product of the wide-ranging interests and the horizons of the natural scholar and oriental traveller Ulrich Jasper Seetzen. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, immediately after the Napoleonic War, Seetzen set out to travel through the Ottoman Empire and Arabia. In cities like Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus and Cairo, he collected more than three thousand manuscripts which he sent to Gotha.
The manuscripts bear witness to practices of reading and writing of individuals and entire communities in the Near East.
Readers’ notes, ownership statements, and other secondary notes can tell us a lot about how people engaged with their text culture.
Some manuscripts, like the travelogues of the two Maronite brothers, even contain unusual features like an index. Such features can give us a glimpse of literary tastes, consumption, and circulation.
Working in the Research Library means working in an atmosphere of collegiality. In the Library, researchers and students of all levels from different disciplines can discuss their projects and exchange ideas. Fellows and interns are also often part of the research community here. It is the place to go for stimulating dialogue.
Information on the Orientalia Collection of the Gotha Research Library:
www.uni-erfurt.de/en/gotha-re...