Bonding on the margins: an Ottoman textual community in the 18th -19th centuries

Official URL: https://ies.sas.ac.uk/news-events/news/call-contributors-routledge-companion-book-studies

This study examines the vibrant, collective reading culture of non-elite urbanites in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Istanbul through the marginalia of heroic narratives, specifically the stories of Hamza and Ebû Müslim. Moving beyond the traditional scholarly focus on bureaucratic and learned elites, this chapter leverages thousands of reader annotations to illuminate a highly democratic textual world encompassing craftsmen, soldiers, Janissaries, and migrants. Utilizing Brian Stock’s concept of "textual communities" and Barbara Rosenwein’s "emotional communities," the author argues that these manuscripts operated as dynamic frameworks for social and moral bonding. Because these books circulated through active rental networks rather than private shelves, their margins transformed into interactive public venues—material precursors to modern social media. Within these "portable majlises," readers actively shared emotions, negotiated ethical codes, and debated performances. Ultimately, the study demonstrates that in an era of destabilizing Westernization and modernization, ordinary Ottomans actively constructed a shared communal identity and sought stability by mapping their contemporary lives onto a romanticized, heroic past.