From Manuscript Intelligence to Public Information: Reconfiguring Knowledge of the Ottoman World in Sixteenth-Century Venice, with a response by Deborah Blocker (UC Berkeley)

This paper examines knowledge of the Ottoman Empire in sixteenth-century Venice not as a set of fixed representations, but through the knowledge practices by which merchants, diplomats, authors and publishers gathered, translated, organised, and circulated information. Knowledge practices were never homogeneous, but comprised multiple forms and channels coexisting in uneasy relations. Moreover, they arose from a connected history of exchange in both directions. Finally, they changed over time. From the 1520s onwards they became more public, more vernacular, more synthetic and more collaborative. This reconfiguration, however, was neither linear nor irreversible as the wars of the 1570s would reveal.