Ottoman History Podcast - The Ottoman Erotic

Episode Date: December 18, 2016

Episode 289 with İrvin Cemil Schick hosted by Susanna Ferguson and Matthew Ghazarian Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud What terms and ideas were considered erotic in early modern Ottoman literature, and what can studying them tell us about later historical periods and our own conceptions of the beauty, love, and desire? In this episode, we welcome İrvin Cemil Schick back to the podcast to discuss a project he is compiling with İpek Hüner-Cora and Helga Anetshofer: a dictionary called the "Erotic Vocabulary of Ottoman Literature." Release Date: 18 December 2016 « Click for More »

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Susie Ferguson. And I'm Max Zarian. And today we're happy to welcome back a guest who may be familiar to some of our listeners, to welcome back a guest who may be familiar to some of our listeners, Dr. Ervin Cemil Şık. We're broadcasting today in Istanbul with one of the most fabulous views of the Istanbul waterways that I have ever encountered. So we're sorry that our listening audience can't be here in person. But we think that the subject of our discussion today will be almost as wonderful and fascinating as this view. And so we're here today to talk about a new project of Erwin's, which is an erotic vocabulary of Ottoman literature. So maybe we could just ask you, Erwin, to describe the project a little bit.

What is sort of the scope of it? Who's working on it? What is it about? Sure. So this is a three-person project. There is Helga Annetzhofer, who teaches at University of Chicago. There is Ipek Hunarjola, who is a graduate student, a doctoral student at the University of Chicago. And there's myself. And this came about originally as an article. We began to write an article for a special issue of a certain Turkish studies journal that shall go unnamed. And this was for a special issue that Edith Ambrose was editing, guest editing, and that special issue fell through. And so we decided, well, rather than publishing something incomplete, as we were planning to,

we'll just wait another year or two and publish it in book form. So what is it? It's a dictionary of Ottoman erotic language. It's a dictionary of Ottoman erotic language. Everybody knows, everybody who has any interest in the Middle East knows, for example, about the Perfume Garden, right? Nefzawi's book, which has terms for everything. Many, many different kinds, forms of sexual organs, positions, and so forth. And the question that I basically, that occurred to me at some point, was, well, okay, so Arabic is really rich. What about

Ottoman Turkish? And frankly, I had no idea that it was as rich as it has turned out to be. I didn't expect anything like it. So what we've been doing is we've been scanning Ottoman literature. We have more or less subdivided the Ottoman literature into three. There is Helga's main interest in life is early Anatolian Turkish, so she's looking mostly at those sources, not exclusively, but mostly. Ipek is writing her doctoral thesis on Janani and Sabit and people like that. So she's looking at that sort of literature. And I am looking at the 18th century as well as bona fide erotic sources,

like, let's say, Rujuh, Hilasaba, and books like that. And we just go through them and pick up the dirty words and try to figure out what they mean. Well, this sounds like one of the most fun research projects I think I've heard about, you know, going through a variety of kinds of sources, it sounds like, and picking out the dirty words and trying to figure out what they mean and how they fit together. One question that I had about sort of the process of the project is, how do you know? I mean, obviously, there are some terms that are quite explicit, right? It's quite clear that they are relating to, you know, sexual intercourse, to body parts, to certain acts. But there must also be moments when you encounter a metaphor or, you know, a setup, a plot, a joke. So how do you know when you encounter the erotic in a text? How do

you decide? Okay, well, that's actually an extremely good question because we had to, first of all, figure out what is the scope of this dictionary. In other words, when we say erotic literature or erotic language, what do we mean? That was a difficult question to answer because when you look at, for example, some of these erotic works, they are basically medical works, right? They talk about aphrodisiacs, they talk about all sorts of things,

and they also tell you dirty stories and they also tell you all kinds of things like that. So eventually we decided that it would be silly and counterproductive to try and define what erotic literature is specifically. So our distinction was between lyrical poetry and erotic poetry. That is easier to make. But once you've made that distinction, whether the erotic poetry is medical, or, for example, satirical, or simply, you know, just, you know, sexually explicit, you know, pornographic, whatever, we decided not to distinguish among those. So is the difference between lyrical and erotic poetry a difference of content,

in that they describe or discuss different kinds of scenarios, or is it a difference in actually in the language used, or how do you make the distinction? Well, let us say that lyrical poetry is less explicit. I mean, they will talk about the stature of the woman and her eyes and her lips. They're not going to talk about her breasts and her buttocks, or they might talk about embracing, but not necessarily buttocks, you know, or they might

talk about embracing, but not necessarily sexual intercourse, you know, that sort of thing. And what you said is very, very true. There have been several cases where we were stumped. There was a word that seemed to be something that we should be interested in, but we had no idea what it meant. And the reason for that is that a lot of these sources, a lot of the erotic sources, maybe not poetry, but the prose sources are translated from Arabic or from Arabic via Persian. And even those many, many times come from India originally. And so you have terms there that the scribe, the Ottoman scribe, didn't understand. So it's sort of a heteroglossia almost.

I mean, you're calling in kinds of not only different terms, but also different erotic universes potentially. Absolutely. And when you're, you know, confronted with these things, what we had to do was we would look at the word. Sometimes you'd have three, four, five different spellings. And we would try to figure out, okay, what could the Arabic root of this be? And looking at the context, let's say if it's talking about penetration, we might look at, okay, go through lane and figure out all the different Arabic words for penetration and try to see if we could figure out, you know, what the uncorrupted word was. And most of the time we were successful and sometimes we were not. Can you give us an example of a word, maybe one of

the ones that stumped you, if you remember? So, for example, in one of the texts, there was a word, shagra. So it's a sheen, ghain, ra, and tamarbuta, or a he. And this didn't sound like anything we knew, and we had to look around, and we found different spellings in different manuscripts. For example, in one case instead of a there was a, you know, which is easy to make that mistake when you're copying a manuscript. And this one ended

not in a but in an. Well, after looking for a while, we found in Lane, Lane's Arabic lexicon remains really a wonderful treasure. We found, for example, that Shufrul Ferj and Shufrul Mere mean the Labia Majora. And so we were able to, also, we found that there were related words like Shafira, for example, which means a woman who gets great pleasure from sexual intercourse. And so we figured out also from the context that what it really meant was essentially a lustful woman.

So, I mean, you know, the context sort of hinted at that, but we couldn't be sure until we had to dig and find the root and find the words in the classical dictionaries. So with words like these, do you find many instances later on, or do you find that it's tough to find more than a couple cases, or do you find sometimes just an isolated case of, say, for this word? I mean, like all language, erotic words also change over time, of course. I mean, like all language, erotic words also change over time, of course. And I might mention that Helga made an interesting observation at one point,

which is that the words that you hear in the street today, you will also find in the 14th century. Right. So the really rude Turkish street words have been continuously in use for several centuries. However, words like the one I just mentioned, words of Arabic or Persian origin, tend to come and go. And we haven't yet managed, you know, we haven't covered enough literature to be able to do a diachronic analysis and figure out when words came in and when they went out. For now, we are just collecting the words. So therefore, you're right.

Sometimes we are not able to find many instances of the same word. But when you use words, when you look at words, even if you see only one or two uses, you can trust them as real words, as opposed to if it's a metaphor, an imagery. Well, that could be just one writer's fancy and not necessarily part of language. So you have to be very careful with those sorts of things, with the metaphors and the imagery of which, by the way, there are many, many wonderful

examples. I'm sure many authors taking a lot of poetic license. Yes. I mean, we have several areas, you know, we're classifying it into several groups. There are war metaphors, there are hunting metaphors, there are food metaphors, there are animal metaphors. And it's remarkable that some of them really do recur and some absolutely are unique. Got it. recur and some absolutely are unique. Got it. So another question I had was the sort of context of the texts that you were all looking at. Like sort of in what places or among what audiences did these terms emerge and circulate? Were these texts that were texts for sale or were they produced for private patrons? Were they taboo at the time when they were published or were they more casually or mainstream? You know, people who are not

historians and sort of the person in the street generally has a vision of history as a straight line, right? So if society today is more permissive than it was 30 years ago, then 50 years ago, it must have been even less permissive and 300 even less so. And that's simply not the case. When you look at history, you see that things come and go. For example, Ottoman society was quite permissive in the 16th century, not at all so in the 17th, much more permissive in the 18th. not at all so in the 17th, much more permissive in the 18th. So things really do come and go a lot. I'll give you an example.

There is a copy of Hamse-i Atayi at Topkapi Museum Library where all the dirty parts have been rubbed out. So clearly this manuscript was originally made for the court and somebody enjoyed it for a while, but then somebody came and said, what? What is this outrageous thing? And got rid of all the compromising aspects. What is interesting about some of these sources is that when you look at who wrote them, you find that they are very serious, respectable people. For instance, Rujuh-e-Sheikh is attributed by Haji Halife,

by Katip Çelebi, to Ibn Kemal Pasha, who was Yavuz Sultan Selim's Sheikh-ul-Islam. But even if that attribution is wrong, as it has been challenged, one of the most important translations of that work into Ottoman is by Mustafa Ali of Gallipoli. Now, you know, he was like the intellectual of his age. He was, you know, certainly religiously, you know, impeccable and all of that. And yet he translated this completely pornographic work. He did it for the palace. It was a commission.

We know that many of these works were actually commissioned by sultans, often for the crown prince, for his education. And when you look at the books, they usually in the Sebebi Telif, the explanation of why the book was written, you find some apologistic things like, you know, book was written, you find some apologistic things like, you know, the Prophet said to be fruitful and multiply. And so I'm trying to help people, you know, become more lustful so that they will multiply, that sort of thing. But the fact is, our view of what is and isn't ayyub, you know, in Turkish, what is shameful, has changed a lot. And clearly, these things were not considered

shameful at certain periods of history. That's really interesting. And I hope that, you know, as the project continues, you can maybe develop some theories or some ideas about why, you know, certain kinds of things become more or less taboo in different moments. But what you just said made me think of another question that I had, which is that, you know, it sounds like many of the authors of the texts that you work on, which are 18th century texts, are prominent male intellectuals or, you know, government's appointees at high levels. So I guess I wanted to ask, you know, from your research, what can you say about the way that erotic language was gendered and classed? I mean, who got to use it in these texts?

Who read it? Who encountered it? Well, who read it is a difficult question to answer. Always, because we often don't know. question always always because we often don't know we do know that there are in some cases very many copies of certain texts so there was a demand clearly but who was the demand we don't know as far as as the genders though I think what what I have learned from from this literature that we've been looking at is that we have to revise, first of all, a lot of our views that we have from today. For example, now, you know, well, okay,

many people now talk about gender as a continuum and so forth, but even so, there is this view of gender as essentially a dichotomy, male or female. When you look at Ottoman classical literature, you find that there are essentially three genders. There is men, there is women, and there is boys. These are distinct genders.

Boys are not female substitutes. They are not like women in any shape or form. They are boys. It's a completely different gender. Furthermore, boys grow up to be men. Therefore, genders are fluid. Therefore, you can go from one gender to another. So a lot, when we look at sexuality, for example,

today we tend to think about, well, you know, who are the partners? Is it man to man? Is it man to woman? Is it man to woman? Is it woman to woman? Whatever. In those days, that's not the way it's looked at. The main division is along the lines of who penetrates and who is penetrated. That is much more important than whom you penetrate

or who penetrates you. And so, you know, we really have to avoid presentism as much as possible and look at these texts and try to figure out their own context. I mean, this is the question that you asked, of course, and this is what we're trying to do. That's fascinating. And it reminds me of the work of Afsana Najmabadi on Iran, where she looked at visual art from the 18th century in Iran

and found a similar thing that, you know, the kind of relationships of desire that were figured in those paintings were operated along very different axes than we now think about sort of heteronormative man-woman gender and sexuality. So maybe that's an opportunity to sort of ask you to speculate a little bit on two fronts. First of all, do you think that, I mean, just thinking about Najm Abadi's work and what you just said gives me the sense that maybe there was kind of a shared erotic universe or world that was perhaps shared between Iran and the Ottoman Empire or at least that there was a lot of overlap and cross-pollination?

I think that's absolutely true. I'm familiar with and a great admirer of Efsan's work. And a lot of, you know that in the 19th century, generally Ottoman literature, Ottoman art, were viewed as essentially imitative and poor copies of their Persian equivalents. That's not the case, I think, but it is certainly true that there is a great deal of overlap. And you find, for example, I'll give you an example. There is a manuscript by the name of Tufey Mutey Hilein, so it's a gift for the married people. And it's a sex manual.

And this was published a few years ago in Turkish translation, and everybody was very happy to have access to it. And the text says that it's a translation into Ottoman from a Persian original by Seyza Ari. Well, yes, there is such a Persian original, except that a lot of the text is identical to certain Arabic sources. So probably Shehzadi did not actually write it in Persian, but adapted it.

Like in those days, translation was mostly adaptation rather than pure translation. So he probably took an Arabic original, added some of his own stuff, and then somebody else took that and added his own stuff. And so the whole notion of authorship becomes extremely difficult to establish, and therefore the nationality or the origin of the author is even more impossible. I mean, that's really fascinating because my, you know, my sort of superficial understanding of also Arabic literature and letters in the sort of pre-modern moment is that actually copying what we would think of as, you know, physically copying a text and or, you know, translating it was actually considered a very high, if not the highest form of intellectual production. You know, the focus on the original text and the sort of critique that something is

derivative is actually quite a recent phenomenon. Sure, this is completely modern. The whole idea of originality of the author as this single genius who is, you know, creating stuff in solitude, this is totally bourgeois art philosophy. This is, you know, 19th century stuff. And this has been slowly eroding in our day because if you think about the postmodern turn, you think about all the pastiches that the postmodern art and literature have and all of that, you begin to see that, in fact, art and literature are being viewed more and more as intertextual,

as opposed to these unique creations of unique individuals as they used to be. And, you know, in the pre-modern or early modern periods, art and literature were produced collectively, there is no doubt. out. I'm curious about the other forms of erotic or artistic knowledge that you've encountered beyond just individual terms. You know, I'm thinking here about visual art or sound or longer text forms like plots or scenes or motifs that you may have noticed in your research. You know, are these texts part of a broader Ottoman erotic world? I would say yes. We, well, Tülay Artan of Sabancı University and I wrote something about the changing visual language of the 18th century, where when you look at Ottoman erotic miniatures, you do see certain changes starting from, let's say, the 16th century

into the 18th and beyond. What is interesting is that there is this received idea that Ottoman miniature painting essentially ended at the beginning of the 18th century, that Levni was the final great exponent of the art. And what we found is that in the 1790s and even the early 1800s, you have really top quality miniature painting. The reason this is unknown is that these are all

erotic pictures and art historians tend to look the other way. So I think this is also you know, this is a sobering fact because it suggests that some of the opinions and knowledge that we have now has been colored by this kind of puritanical or at least prudish attitudes towards erotic art.

In the 18th century, you do find quite explicit miniatures. Once again, I was surprised by how much. Okay, maybe not as much as India, but certainly it's a very significant amount. And when you look at some of these albums, for instance, Julay and I went to Paris to look at one of the albums, which is in private hands. It has 85 extremely high-quality miniatures in it. And it is probably from the Balkans, judging from the style, that's what we thought, maybe from Schumann in Bulgaria or something like that.

But it's all in Turkish. The text is all in Turkish, Ottoman Turkish. And when you look at that, it's so accomplished that it's very clear this is not a unique creation. There must have been tens maybe of such books that the same workshop produced. Maybe only one of them survived, but there certainly must have been many more. Yeah, that's fascinating because it reminds us that the taboos or the shames of the present or the things that we now find not interesting shouldn't prevent us from recognizing

when something must have been quite a flourishing tradition in its own time. Right, exactly. That seems like an important note. Hi, and welcome back to this episode of the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm here today with my colleague, Matt Gazarian. I'm Susie Ferguson, discussing the erotic vocabulary of Ottoman literature with our guest today, Dr. Ervin Cemil Şık. We've been having a fascinating discussion about the kinds of terms that circulated in Ottoman Turkish, about sort of sexual matters, erotic imagery. circulated in Ottoman Turkish about sort of sexual matters, erotic imagery. And I wanted to turn in the second part of our podcast to the question of what studying the vocabulary of Ottoman erotic

life can tell us, if anything, about your social life in Ottoman cities or in the countryside, or, you know, if you have any examples that you can think of that link this word of words, this world of words to what we might actually be able to know about what's happening in people's lives. Well, one of the things that you can tell immediately is the outlook towards, let's say, gender and sexuality. So, for example, we are very accustomed today to think of a concept like homosexuality. But in fact, of course, this concept is a very modern one. It was invented in the 19th century in Vienna, not surprisingly. And so, when you look at Ottoman, it's very interesting to note that there is no such term.

There is no term that is all-embracing in the sense that it applies to male-male and female-female sexuality. It applies to active, quote-unquote, versus passive, quote-unquote, partners and so forth. So there are many words for each of these, but there is no single word that embraces them all. So this says something. This says something about how people looked at individuals, how they looked at people's sexuality, and so forth. Another example might be how they describe sexuality, not as an immutable identity as we tend to look at it today, but rather as a preference, as a taste, as a matter of taste. It's like, you know, some people like fish, some people like meat.

You know, it's a very subjective thing. It's not who you are, it's what you like to do in life. So, for instance, one of the words that you see when they describe the person's sexuality is they will say, they'll mention mashreb. Now, mashreb, of course, comes from the Arabic verb to drink, and it says something about your temperament, your likes, what attracts you, but it doesn't say about what you are deep inside. Another example I might give you might be, for instance, when you look at the metaphors that people use for sexuality, they will use food metaphors, hunting metaphors, military metaphors, and these tell you a lot about life then, about what people ate, what people did, how they viewed hunting,

what animals they hunted, and so forth. So, these really tell you, I mean, okay, let me make a confession here. I'm not going to claim that I'm studying these erotic texts for any reason other than they're fun. I mean, yes, they are fun. I mean, clearly. That seems like a great reason to do research. Yeah, I think so too. This is the whole reason we do Ottoman history. I mean, it is fun, and I'm doing it for that reason. But at the same time, you really do learn a great deal from it. I mean, not only do you learn a great deal, but because of prudish

attitudes, it has been neglected for too long. And so there really is a great deal more to learn. So I've got a question for you. I want to make sure I understood what you said before, which is that someone's sexual preference is sort of described like their drink. Like, I'm a gin and tonic person, but you like old fashions. And so it's like, onun meshrebe. Right.

Wow. That's absolutely true. The words are, for instance, meshreb or matlab, which means your desire, or mezheb, which is even more interesting, like your sect. So there are words like this, but these are all matters of your opinion, your belief, your preference, as opposed to your nature, as opposed to your genes. I've encountered how in the late 19th and early 20th century, ideas of race, ethnicity, or sort of the immutability of your, say, your Jewishness, your Armenianness, your Greekness, your even Christianness in some contexts, or your Muslimness, whatever, become more immutable and the boundaries among these different groups become less permeable. And I'm wondering if in later texts that you and your colleagues may have looked at, that you see a correlation also in the way people view sexual preference, or if there's, in a different time, that it correlates with other events going on in the social world.

Well, in terms of the history, the diachronic analysis, we study texts from the mid-14th to the mid-19th century. The mid-14th, well, that's kind of clear. We're talking about Ottoman literature, and that's where the earlier sources come from. Why the mid-19th? Well, that. Why the mid-19th? Well, that's because the mid-19th begins to see a number of changes, largely under Western influence.

But you begin to see things like heteronormativity, for example. You know, there are texts that begin to frown upon boy love, whereas previously that was not the case. In earlier texts, what people do frown upon is excess and show-off. So if you do something too much or if you do it in the open, then it's in poor taste. But whatever you do in your bedroom, nobody cares about.

I mean, that comes across very very clearly in the 19th century starting in the middle of the 19th century that begins to change and people begin to have opinions about what is right and what is wrong so in that respect

I think that's something also very important to consider I think people you know, that's something also very important to consider. I think people begin to look at identities as more immutable, as more a definition of what you are in the more modern period. And in the earlier periods, I think it's more what you do than what you are. Do you have any speculations? I mean, I know scholars like Afsaneh's work that we mentioned before and also the work of Joseph Massad on the sort of sex and sexuality, histories of desire in Arabic,

have speculated that that's partly to do with the sort of the coming of a sort of European gaze and mindset to the Middle East or to the sort of Ottoman world. Do you agree with that speculation? Or do you have other ideas about why this shift that you and Matt are describing might be going on? Well, I haven't encountered any other reason for this to be happening around the mid of the 19th century. For instance, if you look at Vehbi's Shefkengiz, which is 18th century, it's very interesting.

It's a dialogue between a man who is partial to women and a man who is partial to boys. And they each defend their own predilection completely on the basis of taste. I mean, it's not like what you're doing is wrong, but you fool, you're ignoring the best things in life, because what I do is so much more pleasurable. And so they discuss this, you know, why boys are better than women, or women are better than boys. And this goes on and on and on. And then at the very end, they decide that,

you know, they are not able to come to a conclusion so they go to a sage to a learned man and the learned man says oh you're all in the wrong path true love is God love for God and all of that and sort of sets them straight now I am convinced that that final part is just to make the whole poem

palatable to the authorities basically it's very clear in fact this poem is the single source the whole poem palatable to the authorities. Basically, it's very clear. In fact, this poem is the single source from which we derive the most words. So, you know, it is very clearly written in order to titillate. It's very clearly written as an erotic word. And what's interesting is there are no value judgments

attached to boy love versus love of women. Of course, you notice, and this is not my fault, I'm putting the male at the center, but that's because that's how the literature is. And starting in the 19th century, you really begin to see a change, and that probably has to do with the Western influences. I don't see any other reason.

So I'm wondering about the, if there were any analogs to today's scandals revolving around the sexual tastes of people in important positions of power, that do we have any famous grand viziers or sultans or ministers or whomever who are subject to ridicule or critique because of their sexual taste oh yes oh yes now um one of one of the issues is that um in in satirical work

hijviye or or um hezliyat and things like that um sexualization is very often part of the way of expressing satirical attacks. And so when they talk about a certain vizier as being too fond of this or too fond of that, you never quite know if that's for real or they're just trying to insult him. There's that problem because, as I said, too much of a good thing is considered bad and so it's not that he necessarily sleeps with a boy but if he sleeps with 20 you know within one week well that's not

a good thing right so when you see that again you're never quite sure if it's for real or not but there is a lot of it there is in fact a very strange little lithographic book published in the 19th century, which is a collection of such verses. So they collected them from many different poets, people like Sururi and others. And my God, it's so vulgar

that even I blushed and that's not easy, you know, for me to blush. Now, on the other hand, for instance, Fuad Pasha, you know, the famous Grand Vizier of the Tanzimat period, was well known to be partial to boys. So, you know, even as late as the assumptions about their fitness or non-normative sexual practices are often used to kind of undermine or question somebody's fitness for power or influence in other spheres of life. And I'm curious, based on what you were saying before about this being a matter of tastes, like the drink you order when you go to a bar,

if that's the case in the Ottoman Empire, if that changes over time. Well, I think, once that if people do too much of it in too public a way, then they are considered, you know, unfit. But what you say more precisely reminded me of something that I read in Bobovsky's description of the palace, where he talks about the eunuchs being assigned to very, very high positions. And he says, which only goes to show that it is not always the most able

or most deserving who get these positions. And that makes you wonder whether, you know, I mean, he viewed the penis as an important part of managing an empire or what? I mean, why would a eunuch be unfit to manage the empires? It was never quite clear to me. But I found that to be very funny. That sort of thing I never saw in the Turkish example.

Quite to the contrary, you had many grand viziers who were hadim, who were castrated. quite to the contrary, you had many grand viziers who were hadim, who were castrated. That's really interesting because I think that this kind of material then provides us a way to kind of think outside of our contemporary assumptions about not just sort of the stakes of non-normative sexuality, but also the relationships between sexual practices, gendered categories, which may intersect with both age and also class, presumably, and power, right? So that, you know, we suddenly have to conceive of a world in which, you know, being a woman or being a castrated man or being a man who likes boys doesn't, we can't assume what that tells us about somebody's presumed fitness for a rule, for example.

That's very, very true. And sometimes, for example, Leslie Pierce pointed out that age trumps gender in certain cases, right? So at the harem, the senior woman, the valide, the sultan's mother, had a hell of a lot more power than some young uppity prince. So it was not just a matter of male versus female. It had a lot to do with other things. And as you said, we cannot assume, based upon our, you know, prejudices from today, we cannot assume to understand how people viewed others, you know, historically. Right. So I want to push you on this last point. This is something that was kind of on my mind as

we've been talking, which is that, you know, as much as we clearly can't presume that our understandings of sexual identity or of power differentials between different sexual tastes were applicable to earlier moments. I'm curious, you know, to what extent the erotic remains recognizable? I mean, can we assume, for example, that practices that we find erotic today or that we associate with, you know, titillation, can we assume, to what extent can we assume that those were also similar in earlier times? And if there's anything in your research where you kind of had to stop and say, wait, you know, that looks sexy to me, but I'm not sure that in this context, that actually was meant to be an

erotic statement. Well, I mean, eroticism changes just the way humor does. You know, when you read medieval funny books, we usually find them rather unfunny because things really do change. And so I wouldn't be surprised. Certainly one thing that we have seen, and now I'm coming all the way to the 21st century, through the internet, is we have seen this proliferation of tiny communities of interest

that are turned on by something extremely specific that most of the rest of us would say, what? But they find each other and they find that to be a very important conduit to happiness. In fact, in the 1960s, this is one of the things that certain more progressive sociologists were saying in the 60s, is stop looking at certain things as perversions, because in fact these can be sources

of a great deal of happiness if the person is well adjusted and has consenting partners and so forth so i think um uh you know it is extremely likely that that certain things have changed certain things certainly that were funny or were erotic ones are not anymore and vice versa. I couldn't give you an exact example, but for instance, as something that's slightly surprising, in one of the 1792 or 1793 miniatures in one of the manuscripts, there's a woman attached to the ceiling through pulleys. So, well, okay okay they were doing that

even back then so I'm not suggesting there's nothing new under the sun of course things keep changing but at the same time there's something about human nature that persists well I think that we'll encourage

our listeners to keep an eye out for the book when it comes out so that they can see for themselves what things perhaps resonate today and what things seem quite far off and foreign. So we want to really thank you for coming on the podcast again. It's been a real pleasure to have you. And I venture to say that this is a subject that's perhaps not discussed enough in scholarly podcasts or venues. So we're really happy to be able to have a conversation about the erotic vocabulary of the Ottoman Empire. And I should mention also that this episode will be part of an ongoing series that we have at the podcast, curated by myself and our friend Satchel Yilmaz on women, gender, and sex in the Ottoman

Empire. So listeners can also turn to that series to hear other episodes that deal with related issues about both gender and sex and sexuality and the relationship between them. So thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. And for our listeners who want to find out more, we will post a bibliography for this episode with many of the works that we've mentioned today. And we also encourage you to visit our website, www.OttomanHistoryPodcast.com, where you're welcome to leave any comments or questions you may have. We'd also love it if you joined us on Facebook, where we try as best we can to stay in touch with our community of over 20,000 listeners now, as well as to post new news about upcoming series and new episodes. So that's all for this episode. And until next time, take care. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 Hupney! © BF-WATCH TV 2021