I went to a paper yesterday presented by Gottfried Hagen on Evliye Celebi and his cosmology. I just had coffee and told him about our sessions – he was very happy to see a new growing interest in such travel accounts!
http://ii.umich.edu/ii/people/all/g/ghagen.html
Here is his abstract for his paper:
111. Gottfried Hagen, University of Michigan
The Place of “Cosmological Knowledge” in Ottoman Society
The encyclopedic scope of the Ottoman Turkish Book of Travels of Evliya C ̧elebi (1611–c. 1687) allows us many glimpses into its author’s understanding of the workings of the created world: Evliya constantly makes assumptions about physical forces (like magnetism or weather), technology (like vehicles or weapons), natural powers and processes (like procreation or healing), human nature and society (like mechanisms of governance), and spiritual powers (like miracles of saints). Modern intellectual history has tended to break those down into modern categories of knowledge and disciplines, separating out “natural science,” “history,” and “government, ” as well as the problematic catch-all “religion.” As the starting point of my paper, I will argue that these areas of world explanation should be considered together, as a whole, in what could be called “cosmological knowledge,” of which Evliya represents a mostly vernacular case. In applying methodologies from a “history of knowledge,” I propose to study how and why certain aspects of such “cosmological knowledge” were codified in writing. Again, modern historians have assumed that such codifications simply parallel vernacular transmission in aiming primarily at practical applications, e.g., of geography, history and governance, or medicine. Instead, I suggest, the codification of such knowledge potentially transforms it into a social and political currency that
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takes a function of its own. I will use the case of maritime knowledge as preserved in the works of Piri Reis (d. 1553), Seydi Ali Reis (d. 1563), and Katib C ̧ elebi (d. 1657), to make this argument. The result should be a better understanding of the social place and consumption of such books in Ottoman intellectual circles as a contribution to Ottoman intellectual history.
