The panel will open with a broad-ranging discussion of the Eurasian geopolitics of early modern vernacularization. According to a widely-accepted narrative, confessional and political identities were merged in centralized early modern empires, headed by bureaucracies that espoused vernacular languages as central to their identities. Islamic Eurasia saw the rise of the confessionally defined empires of the Ottomans in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Safavids in Iran, and the Mughals in India, all three of which witnessed the expansion of vernaculars into domains hitherto controlled by cosmopolitan idioms – similar to how European vernaculars were beginning to supersede the cosmopolitan culture of latinitas. Recent scholarship sees the Persianate world as characterized by both the cultivation of Persian and the emergence of vernaculars, such as Ottoman Turkish, Chaghatay Turkic, or Urdu, which were thoroughly imbued with the features of Persian. Ferenc Csirkés’s paper pursues by contrast a different viewpoint, looking at Turkic in Safavid Iran (ca. 1501-1722) against the background of the urban majority culture of Persian. Discussing the reception of Mir Ali Shir Nava’i’s (d. 1499) poetry in Iran, it demonstrates that Turkic was supported by language ideologies that connected it to the tribal matrix from which all three Islamic empires had emerged. Csirkés argues that Turkic in fact shadowed the prestige of Persian as another transregional idiom and literary subculture, maintained through networked relations between Turkophone elites from the Ottoman realm to Iran, Central Asia, and Mughal India.
Zhonghua Wang’s paper explores a different set of connections: a global communication network and conduit of intellectual activity that spanned all of Eurasia. The Jesuit network of correspondence, educational institutions, and erudite priests spread Catholic theology and European learning to Asia, and played an important role in the diffusion and construction of knowledge about China in Europe. This network crisscrossed cities, towns and ports from Western Europe to East Asia, and formed a Eurasian Republic of Letters. At the European end of the network, the Society of Jesus specialized in gathering, organizing and circulating information from the Jesuit missionaries’ letters and reports. Daniello Bartoli’s six-volume Istoria della Compagnia di Gesù (History of the Company of Jesus), was “the culmination of a century of collective efforts” at establishing a long-lasting relationship between the Society and the European public. This paper analyzes Bartoli’s dependence on and his intervention in missionaries’ reports from China, his efforts at accommodating Chinese history into Biblical chronology, and his celebration of the superiority of the missionaries’ knowledge. This paper shows Bartoli’s role as world historian in the production both of new ethnographic knowledge and Catholic ideology for early modern Europe.
Rather than tracing personal networks and connections, in the final paper, Jane Mikkelson combines close reading with a broad-ranging history of ideas to discuss the entanglements between two poets—one in England, the other in India—and their practices of meditative rereading and lyric experimentation. Andrew Marvell (d.1678) and Bidel of Delhi (d.1720) conjure a drop of dew in poems that show how this “little globe” strives to infuse its precarious existence with imaginative spiritual aspiration. Within the space of a lyric poem, the dew drop enjoys an intense inward existence before it “does, dissolving, run / Into the glories of th’ almighty sun” (Marvell). Likewise Bidel is fascinated by microcosmic images: drops of dew, bubbles, sparks, atoms. As a figure for meditation, dew allows both poets to experiment with placing themselves into a “little globe” (Marvell), or, as Bidel says, into “a world of reflection.” Mikkelson proposes a comparative method of “entangled close reading.” Examining Bidel’s Persian ghazals about dew alongside Marvell’s “On a Drop of Dew” invites speculation about common frameworks: Neoplatonic thought; manuals (in Persian and English) that popularize meditation practices; lyric traditions that repurpose classical models for new styles. Analyzing how both poets draw on different strands of shared influence—Galenic humoral theory, Avicennan ideas, Neoplatonism—this paper considers how these remarkable parallel developments on two “sides” of the Eurasian world suggest the possibility of much wider, distantly entangled ecosystems of lyric thought.