The Ottoman Empire and the Classical Tradition at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century

FAIN: FT-54346-06

Karen Alexandra Leal
President and Fellows of Harvard College (Cambridge, MA 02138-3800)

I propose a study of how new interpretations of the classical tradition in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries affected not only European perceptions of the Ottoman empire but also trends among intellectuals within the empire. Most notably, beginning in the late 1600s, it is possible to discern significant developments in how certain members of the Greek Orthodox intelligentsia conceptualized their community, both in relation to contemporary Ottoman society of which it was, by the turn of the eighteenth century, an integral part and to the classical past that was assuming an increasingly larger role in Europe’s evolving cultural identity.