How can scholars profit from the many textual sources of late medieval Muslim Anatolia on the eve of Ottoman hegemony, in the paucity of contemporary chronicles and archival documentation? For this month’s ANAMED Talk, Sara Nur Yıldız and Andrew Peacock will discuss how these works shed light not only on intellectual and literary currents of an Islamicizing Anatolia, but also on the development of regional court life, the language and aspirations of kingship, and the religious and political concerns of courts. They will also consider how textual sources can illuminate the religious and cultural life of society beyond the elite.
Moderated by Zeynep Oktay, this talk will be held in English.
Sara Nur Yıldız is a political, cultural and intellectual historian of medieval Anatolia, specializing on the Seljuk, Mongol and beylik periods. She taught at Istanbul Bilgi University and worked as a researcher at the Orient-Institut Istanbul. She currently lives in Berlin while working on a research project based at the University of Florence, and is in the midst of completing Mongol Rule in Seljuk Anatolia: The Politics of Conquest and History Writing, 1243-1282 (Brill, forthcoming).
Andrew Peacock is Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic History at the University of St Andrews. Between 2012 and 2017 he was Principal Investigator of the European Research Council-funded project ‘The Islamisation of Anatolia, c. 1100-1500’. Recent publications include Islam, Literature and Society in Mongol Anatolia (Cambridge, 2019). In 2022 he will be a Senior Fellow at ANAMED.
Issue 66, December 2023
Turkey’s Centenary Issue
