Marginal Commentaries on Vernacular Texts: Beyond the Learned–Vernacular Dichotomy in Ottoman Manuscripts

This talk examines the development of a marginal commentary tradition on Turkish vernacular texts in the early modern Ottoman Empire. While commentaries are associated with texts in Arabic, Persian, or ornate Ottoman Turkish, similar critical paratexts were employed in the teaching of simple Turkish texts in the form of marginal commentaries. In this talk, I focus on marginal commentaries on cathechistic works, particularly works in the tradition of Mehmed Birgivi (d. 1573). I argue that these marginal commentaries are crucial to understanding the authority of vernacular works among scholarly reading communities, thus rethinking the “learned-vernacular” dichotomy in Ottoman written culture.

Dr Aslıhan Gürbüzel is Associate Professor of Ottoman History at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University. She is the author of Taming the Messiah: The Formation of an Ottoman Political Public Sphere, 1600–1700 (UC Press, 2023). She specializes in early modern cultural history and Ottoman Sufism, and is currently working on Arabic to Turkish translations in the early modern Ottoman period.