When
Come join us on various Wednesdays this Spring semester for the History Lunch Lecture Symposium. We will gather in Chávez 406a to learn more about our colleagues' scholarship. Additional details will be posted here a week before the event.
Open to the University community!
For those of you who are unable to attend in person, please use the following Zoom link: https://arizona.zoom.us/j/82733203379
-Lecture Topic: Ambitious Guildsmen: The Educational Patronage of the Istanbul Furriers’ Guild.
-Lecture Abstract:
From 1657 to 1669, Manolaki the Kastorian, a wealthy Istanbul furrier and merchant, founded three Greek schools in Chios (Sakız), Patmos, and Arta (Narda). His efforts formed part of what has become known as the “Greek Enlightenment”, an educational and literary revival movement among Greek Orthodox Ottoman subjects that occurred between 1670-1820 and was supported by a variety of patron classes. Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the monetization of the economy and increased political pluralism led to the rise of urban elites like merchants and guildsmen, who engaged in philanthropy as a networking tactic and demonstration of status. This presentation focuses the educational patronage of the relatively unknown Istanbul furriers’ guild who, empowered by the political diffusion of the eighteenth century, drew on their professional connections to the imperial court and merchant elites and the political and religious networks of the Orthodox patriarchate. Its aims are to (i) investigate the Istanbul furriers’ guild as an early modern craft organization, (ii) situate it within broader Ottoman political, religious, and intellectual networks, (iii) understand the ways and mechanisms whereby the furriers acted as educational patrons and their motivations for doing so and (iv) incorporate the history of Greek schools within the context of eighteenth-century Ottoman sociopolitical change in an attempt to move beyond the rather limiting preoccupation with the rise of nationalist sentiments. Ultimately, this talk is part of my larger effort to contextualize both the Greek school movement and the “Greek Enlightenment” as Ottoman intellectual and cultural movements brought on by the political and socioeconomic shifts of the early modern era.
-Bio: Myrsini Manney-Kalogera is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the University of Arizona. She is a social and cultural historian focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, with a special interest in the history of education, minority communities in the Ottoman Empire, and the history of households. Her doctoral dissertation examines the patronage networks underpinning the Greek educational revival of 1750-1821. This project was supported by a Doctoral Fellowship from the American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT), a Fulbright-Hays (FH-DDRA) research award from the United States Department of Education, and a research grant from the Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Institute (SBSRI) at the University of Arizona. She also holds a Master’s Degree from SOAS, University of London and a Bachelor’s Degree from Columbia University.