The Editorial Team of RSSM proposes some readings by authors of national and international significance that address topics related to the Mediterranean. The reading suggestions for January 2025 are: Khaled El-Rouayheb, Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century e Fariba Zarinebaf, Mediterranean Encounters. Trade and Pluralism in Early Modern Galata
Here you can find the suggestions for December 2024.
Reading suggestions for January 2025: book summaries

Title: Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century
Authors: Khaled El-Rouayheb
Date of publishing: 2015
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781107337657
Pages: 365
For much of the twentieth century, the intellectual life of the Ottoman and Arabic-Islamic world in the seventeenth century was ignored or mischaracterized by historians. Ottomanists typically saw the seventeenth century as marking the end of Ottoman cultural florescence, while modern Arab nationalist historians tended to see it as yet another century of intellectual darkness under Ottoman rule. This book is the first sustained effort at investigating some of the intellectual currents among Ottoman and North African scholars of the early modern period. Examining the intellectual production of the ranks of learned ulema (scholars) through close readings of various treatises, commentaries, and marginalia, Khaled El-Rouayheb argues for a more textured – and text-centered – understanding of the vibrant exchange of ideas and transmission of knowledge across a vast expanse of Ottoman-controlled territory.
From publisher’s website.

Title: Mediterranean Encounters. Trade and Pluralism in Early Modern Galata
Author: Fariba Zarinebaf
Date of publishing: 2018
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 9780520289932
Pages: 424
Mediterranean Encounters traces the layered history of Galata—a Mediterranean and Black Sea port—to the Ottoman conquest, and its transformation into a hub of European trade and diplomacy as well as a pluralist society of the early modern period. Framing the history of Ottoman-European encounters within the institution of ahdnames (commercial and diplomatic treaties), this thoughtful book offers a critical perspective on the existing scholarship. For too long, the Ottoman empire has been defined as an absolutist military power driven by religious conviction, culturally and politically apart from the rest of Europe, and devoid of a commercial policy. By taking a close look at Galata, Fariba Zarinebaf provides a different approach based on a history of commerce, coexistence, competition, and collaboration through the lens of Ottoman legal records, diplomatic correspondence, and petitions. She shows that this port was just as cosmopolitan and pluralist as any large European port and argues that the Ottoman world was not peripheral to European modernity but very much part of it.
From publisher’s website.