Documenting Ottoman Plants: The Unseen Work of the Translator

Our theme for the autumn and winter terms is ‘An Open Book: Gardens in Literature and Letters’.

Throughout the seventeenth century, European naturalists grew increasingly interested in both indigenous plants and newly bred garden flowers from the Ottoman Empire. Although early modern Ottomans did not typically include botanical illustrations in their work, this began to change due to scholarly and commercial developments.  These practical illustrations were designed to attract customers, encouraging them to purchase newly bred flowers or cultivate popular plants; they were also valuable for identifying and collecting indigenous plants. I argue that because these Ottoman illustrations were often created anonymously in artisans’ workshops, and since they neither conformed to the conventional (read: Western) standards of scientific illustration nor belonged to any recognized artistic genres, European scholars often questioned their authenticity. As a result, they retranslated these images through the work of sanctioned illustrators to make them more intelligible. Consequently, the original illustrations have remained largely overlooked in modern scholarship: although frequently used and remade for comparison in work-in-progress, they seldom appeared in European naturalists’ publications as reliable depictions.

Duygu Yıldırım is an assistant professor of history at the University of Tennessee. She is broadly interested in cross-cultural botanical and medicinal exchanges between the Ottoman Empire and early modern Europe. She is the co-editor of Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds (Routledge, 2023). Her articles have appeared in History of Science, History of Religions, British Journal for the History of Science among others.