Dr%20John-Paul%20A.%20Ghobrial: List of publications

In the midst of a global pandemic, the Frankfurt POLY (Polycentricity and Plurality of Premodern Christianities) Lectures on "Pathways through Early Modern Christianities" brought together a virtual, global community of scholars and students in the Spring and Summer of 2021 to discuss the fascinating nature of early modern religious life. In this book, eleven pathbreaking scholars from the “four corners” of the early modern world reflect on the analytical tools that structure their field and that they have developed, revised and embraced in their scholarship: from generations to tolerance, from uniformity to publicity, from accommodation to local religion, from polycentrism to connected histories, and from identity to object agency.

This special issue “The Past and its Possibilities in Nahḍa Scholarship” reflects on the role of the past in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nahḍa discourse. It argues that historical reflection played a pivotal role in a number of scholarly disciplines besides the discipline of history, notably philosophy and logic, grammar and lexicography, linguistics, philology, and adab. Nahḍawīs reflected on continuities with the past, the genealogies of their present, and the role of history in determining their future. The introduction of print gave new impulses to the engagement with the historical heritage. We argue for a history of the nahḍa as a de-centred history of possibilities that recovers a wider circle of scholars and intellectuals and their multiple and overlapping local and global audiences. Such a history can also shed light on the many ways in which historical reflection, record-keeping practices, and confessional, sectarian, or communalist agendas are entwined.

This article explores a collection of some 59 letters written by Thomas Coke, the secretary to the Levant Company, to William Paget over the period of 1691 to 1694. Coke’s letters offer a detailed vision into Ottoman decision-making as it unfolded from one day to the next and as it varied across the perspectives of individual Ottoman decision-makers. They challenge longstanding ideas about Ottoman diplomacy, for example the idea that until Carlowitz the Ottomans had only engaged in unilateral diplomacy for short periods of time because of a deep-rooted reluctance to relinquish lands that had once been ruled over by Muslims. Throughout this period, Coke offered to Paget one letter after another full of close detailed accounts of political developments in the capital, ranging from such things as changes in appointments, Ottoman attitudes to war, preparations related to Paget’s arrival, and much more. The rest of this article presents some of the most important aspects of these letters, particularly with regard to what they reveal about Ottoman diplomacy in this critical period of war leading up to the Treaty of Carlowitz.

This essay presents the Théâtre de la Turquie, a work compiled by an anonymous Capuchin missionary (‘Michel Febvre’) based in the Ottoman Empire in the late seventeenth century. Published in French in 1682, the Théâtre offers an intriguing glimpse of how Catholic missionaries used religious materiality as a prism through which to make sense of the religious diversity of the Ottoman world. Moreover, writers like Febvre also drew on the evidence of Eastern Christian religious practices as a way of defending Roman Catholicism against its Protestant critics. The essay uses the Théâtre to reflect on the geography, chronology and afterlives of the ‘paradox of Christian materiality’ described in Bynum’s 2011 study.

This article considers two contemporary ideas about movement and how they intersected with each other. On the one hand, there was a European tradition, rooted in the anxieties and suspicions of state bureaucrats, doctrinally-obsessed clerics and theologians, and officials entrusted with poor relief. Such people worried unceasingly about Eastern Christians in Europe. The testament to this comes in European sources, archives, and even literature, where the stereotype of the wandering Eastern Christian—usually fleeing Muslim persecution—had crystallized by this period into a stock character. ‘Princes of Lebanon’, ‘knights of Jerusalem’, ‘priests of Babylon’: all language coming straight from the documents and witnesses to how Europeans imagined Eastern Christians in their midst. But alongside this, there was a second story of movement that was reflected in Eastern Christian sources. Based on private correspondence, first-person narratives, travelogues, and manuscript colophons, this tradition offers us a glimpse of how Eastern Christians understood their own circulation in the early modern world.

Finally, Nicholas Pickwoad examines a range of commercial binding structures and materials, deploying close physical inspection and forging a precise terminology to reveal careful craftsmanship and technical innovation.The scholarly essays ...

Oral and epistolary flows of information are the dark matter of early modern history. Omnipresent, yet often imperceptible to the historian’s eye, such information flows connected Europe and the Middle East long before the emergence of modern communications, and they played an important role in the creation of a ‘connected world’ in the seventeenth century. The Whispers of Cities explores how information linked Istanbul, London, and Paris in the late seventeenth century. To this end, the book explores early modern communication through the adventures and experiences of Sir William Trumbull, English ambassador to Istanbul from 1687 to 1692. The book tracks Trumbull during his transformation from a civil lawyer and state official in London to a European notable at the heart of Ottoman social networks in Istanbul. During his residence in the Ottoman capital, Trumbull would turn to a wide range of local informants for information and news about Ottoman politics, and he would himself become an agent in the production of news about the Ottoman world for publics in Europe. In this way, this book argues that information flows between Istanbul, London, and Paris were rooted in the personal encounters that took place between Ottomans and Europeans in everyday communication in Istanbul. At the intersection of global history and the history of communication, The Whisper of Cities explores what ‘connectedness’ meant in practice for the lives of people in the seventeenth century.