The purpose of this symposium is to examine issues relating to the authorship of Ottoman primary sources. By examining the sources under investigation, we hope to increase our understanding of their ‘process of production.’ Not only do we wish to put the person of the author under the magnifying glass, so to speak, but also, we would like to investigate the factors that may have influenced them during the process of creating the text. Ultimately, we would like to evaluate the ‘quality’ of the given source material on several levels, and arrive at an understanding of the ‘reliability’ of our sources – both their flaws and shortcomings and their strengths – in connection with issues of authorship.

We would like the papers at the symposium organized around information that is ordinarily not considered as a part of the main body of the text. We hope to closely examine introductions of any length (muqaddime, dibace), along with the authors’ manifestation of motives and intentions in authoring the work (sebeb-i telif, sebeb-i nazm-i kitab), the marginal notes (der-kenar), information of any kind recorded, either by the author or posthumously, in the blank folios, endpapers or endboards (fevaid) of manuscripts, and any other meta-information that reflects the individuality of the author(s).

Furthermore, some of the topics that we would like to see covered, expending on the information mentioned above, in the symposium are: the organization of themes in a book; the highlighting of certain subjects, either through unnecessary emphasis or noticeable under-treatment; the choice and use of language(s); the selection of quotations and their relevance to the narrative; the insertion of remarks obviously intended to lead the reader in certain directions; and the intentional distortion of the historical narrative.

The motivations and intentions with which the texts were produced were obviously shaped to a certain degree by outside pressures and by the interests of the prospective audience. One of the objectives of the symposium will therefore be to determine the relationship between the authors and their patrons or readers, and to compile an inventory of possible ‘external’ and ‘internal’ factors at play for different types of source material.

Each participant is invited to present on either a single source or a genre of primary sources. a wide variety of Ottoman primary sources are valid candidates for investigation. The papers are expected to critically examine the conventional views and to develop new strategies for evaluating the sources, or to shed light onto overlooked source material.