A Printing Press For Shah `Abbas: Science, Learning, and Evangelization in the Near East, 1600--1650 (2013)
Lee, Rosemary Virginia (Author)
University of Virginia
Rowe, Erin K.
White, Joshua
Rowe, Erin K.
White, Joshua
al-Rahim, Ahmed
Osheim, Duane
al-Rahim, Ahmed
Edition Details: Advisor: Osheim, Duane; Committee Members: Rowe, Erin K., White, Joshua, al-Rahim, Ahmed.
Physical Details: 364 pp.
Language: English
This dissertation examines the role that Catholic missionary movements in the Ottoman Empire and Persia played in fostering the growth of science and learning in early modern Europe. The Ottoman Empire's alliance with France, solemnized in the Capitulations, opened the Ottoman Empire to missionaries in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Safavid shah's need for allies in the Ottoman-Safavid war encouraged him to invite missionaries to court. In Persia and the Ottoman Empire, missionaries focused on converting Eastern Christians, rather than Sunni or Shi ite Muslims. Science and learning formed part of the missionary project from the beginning. The religious institution that oversaw missions to the region, the Propaganda Fide, printed scholars' works and subsidized their publications. While in the field, missionaries collected valuable manuscripts, which they later made available to their confreres and sympathizers in Europe. Evangelization's impact is most visible in studies concerned with the peoples, languages, and religions of the Near East (the body of knowledge which would later be known as orientalism). It also extended to other types of knowledge in which Ottoman and Safavid scholars were considered the leaders in the field. These subjects included medicine, natural history, and above all, astronomy and astrology. This project examines how and why evangelization became such an important vector for cross-cultural interactions. This work considers the theological outlooks on salvation and Christian-Muslim relations that missionaries were encouraged to adopt, which were elaborated in influential works rarely studied by modern scholars, like Thomas á Jesu's De Procuranda Salute Omnium Gentium. This work also situates missionaries' use of science and learning within broader strategies that Italians used to create positions of influence in courtly societies. Like other early modern Europeans, missionaries understood scholarly authority to be a transcultural phenomenon not limited to Europeans like themselves. This belief enabled cross-cultural interactions between missionaries, Catholic scholars in Europe and their counterparts in the Ottoman Empire and Persia. Studying evangelization's impact on scholarship in Europe thus offers insight into early modern learned culture and Catholic European perceptions of civility, authority, and science in other societies.
...MoreDescription Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 74/12(E), Jun 2014. Proquest Document ID: 1445401667.
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