Green Reading: Books and the Outdoors in the Early Modern Ottoman World

Abstract

Abstract Before silent and private reading in enclosed spaces became paramount with an overwhelming preference for libraries or private rooms, oral and social reading was far more common, and it took place out-of-doors to a considerable degree. Visual depictions of poets and scholars, and of the reading public in general in the early modern Ottoman world include many representations of people engaged in “green reading,” namely, reading outdoors in open air or in semi-outdoors in close touch with nature. Several developments before and after the turn of the eighteenth century indicate the emergence of new preferences with regard to practices of reading and learning, and a new attitude toward the relationship between orality and literacy. Certain innovations that would only gain strength in later centuries—such as building freestanding libraries; experimenting with musical notation; expanding the means and role of printed books; and, most importantly for this essay, prioritizing mutālaʿa, or private and analytical reading—are among the noteworthy developments that signaled the gradual demise of a regime of reading practices that once recognized a larger role for oral, public, and green reading and that did not consider the book and its silent reader in an enclosed space as the best vehicle for the production and transmission of authoritative knowledge.