Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul ─ A Seventeenth-century Biographer's Perspective

Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul explores the practices of life writing and narration of dreams in early modern Istanbul. It focuses on the prominent biographer Atai (d.1635) who presents a fascinating portrait of contested lives at a time of empire building and shows how seventeenth-century learned circles narrated dreams to assess their position in the Ottoman enterprise. The author argues that dreams provided Ottoman biographers with a means of debating an uncertain world, a world built on diverse social networks and competing world views. Through an engaging and accessible prose style, this book introduces a world where dreams changed lives, the dead appeared in broad daylight, and biographers invited their readers to the gardens of remembrance. Early modern cultural historians who work on life writing, dreams, and practices of remembrance will find Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul a timely and useful contribution. Comparative studies in economic and political life in Habsburg Spain, Safavid Iran, Mughal India and Ming China have shown the shared rhythms between these contemporaneous dynasties and the Ottomans, and there is now a strong interest in comparative approaches to examining cultural lives. In this first monograph on the early modern Ottoman dreamscape, the author aims to address this interest, engaging in a dialogue with the recent scholarship on the early modern cultural history.

AslA± NiyazioA?lu is Associate Professor of History at KoA§ University, Istanbul. After receiving her PhD from Harvard University, she taught at the University of Oxford and was a fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg Institute of Advanced Study at Berlin. Her work has been published at Middle Eastern Literatures and Archivum Ottomanicum among others. She was awarded a number of research fellowships including those from British Institute at Ankara, Harvard University CMES and PEO Peace Scholarship. In 2014, she received young scientist award from the Science Academy of Turkey.