"May Those Who Understand What I Wrote Remember This Humble One": Paratextual Elements in Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Medical Manuscripts

Abstract

For students of early modern manuscript cultures, paratextual components are indispensable in inferring the ways in which people read, studied, and copied a codex. However, Ottoman manuscripts of medicine and healing have not been studied extensively by taking into account how their readers engaged with those texts. This article focuses on the entangled world of healing in eighteenth century Ottoman manuscript culture by using paratexts that connect widely circulated codices of the era to one another and demonstrates that boundaries between scholarly and popular medicine, or alchemy and medicine, were blurry for some readers. Moreover, examples of contributions and interventions from copyists and previous owners of manuscripts reveal the necessity to better understand these figures, other than medical professionals, who had an impact on the reception of medical texts.