The Mediterranean Senses. Sensual Knowledge and Perceptive Culture in
the Early Modern Mediterranean
8 September 2023 at Freie Universität Berlin, Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut.

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Content
Vera-Simone Schulz (Kunsthistorisches Institut Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut)
Multisensual Mediterranean Exchanges: Object Encounters at the Crossroads between Africa, the Middle East and Europe
Mobility, processes of exchange and the role of portable objects have been of key interest
in Mediterranean and transcultural art history during the past two decades. This paper
contributes to these discourses by focusing on metalwork and textiles with regard to their
multi-sensory dynamics in a trans-Mediterranean setting. Shedding new light on object
encounters and artistic interrelations between Italy, the Eastern Mediterranean, and West
and West Central Africa during the early modern period, the paper does not only discuss
the ways how objects moved across longest distances, thus challenging the boundaries of
traditionally established sub-disciplines such as Islamic, African, and European etc. art
histories, but also how these mobile objects were sensually perceived in relation to each
other.
Esther Voswinckel Filiz (Orient-Institut Istanbul)
Ziyaret-i evliyâ: multisensorial encounters at saint shrines in Istanbul
Istanbul is a „territory of grace“ (Horden/Purcell 2000: 403-460): a religious landscape
that is scattered by more than thousand saint tombs. Many of these places have not ceased
to be foci of urban pilgrimage up to the present day. They attract people from different
layers of society and often even from different religious communities. In my paper, I wish
to shed light on the experience of pilgrimage (ziyaret) as a special kind of encounter in
which particular forms of sensibility and attentiveness (engaging hearing, smell, taste,
and touch) are vital. By focusing closely on the ritual, oral tradition, and material culture
related to some famous Sufi saint shrines (türbe) in Istanbul, I wish to suggest that a
particular culture of „refinement of the senses“ used to be taught at saint shrines and in
their vicinities.
A significant rupture in this transmission of an education of the senses has taken place in
the 20th century after the closure of the Sufi lodges and saint shrines in 1925.
Nevertheless, once one starts listening to the voices of the elderly inhabitants of old
neighbourhoods around some saint shrines, one can still encounter fragments of an old,
intricate „fabric“ of multisensorial communications between the living and the buried
ones, between humans and animals, and between people and things. While my
presentation is mainly based on fieldwork, participant observation and enquiries into oral
tradition, I will also confront this ethnographic material with written sources from the
17th and late 19th century. A focus on multisensorial encounters at saint shrines allows
for comparisons between different saint cults in the Mediterranean, past and present.
Such comparisons of every practices related to saintly places and pilgrimage (including
both the act of visiting and the experience of „being visited“ by invisible beings) reveal
that beyond the respective state ideologies on religion, the threat of religious
fundamentalisms and secularism in all its variations, local religious practitioners in many
places around the Mediterranean have kept clinging to and binding themselves to saintly
places in more silent and unobtrusive ways. Religious enthnography in and of the
Mediterranean is thus itself a practice of refining our senses towards what may be – at
first sight – unobtrusive, silent, and volatile.
Marina Inì (University of Cambridge)
The Role of the Senses in Early Modern Quarantine Practices
The paper focuses on the senses and plague prevention practices inside quarantine
centres of the early modern Mediterranean area. Quarantine was adopted across the
Western Mediterranean by several states from the sixteenth century in order to
preventively isolate merchants, sailors, and travellers and disinfect goods coming from
lands suspected of harbouring the disease targeting especially ships, goods and people
coming from Ottoman territories. The paper focuses on different quarantine centres and
their practices in the Italian peninsula, the Venetian territories, France and Malta in order
to understand the role of the senses for passengers and staff experiencing quarantine.
Early modern medical theories stressed the importance of both touch and miasmas, bad
and putrefying smells in the propagation of plague and therefore preventative methods
inside quarantine centres focused on isolation and distancing (the absence of isolation)
and on fumigations, airing and perfuming (to counterbalance miasmas). This paper aims
at analysing such practices from a wider Mediterranean perspective: quarantine centres
were indeed part of a transnational system sharing information and uniformed
procedures and practices, while the passengers quarantined and staff came from all over
the Mediterranean context and beyond. The analysis will aim at understanding what
impact the practices involving the senses had on the passengers and staff’s experience of
such peculiar institutions.
Beyza Uzun (IMT Lucca)
Ottoman Olfactory Traditions in an Imperial Residence: Incense Burners from the
Topkapı Palace Collection
“As long as agallochum and ambergris burn and smoke in this censer, God shall keep sorrow away from the sovereign’s fate [.] Because being connected to the Glory of the World [the Prophet] befits the honor of the
exalted Sultan Selim Khan—may his rule be continuous—he dedicated in perpetuity this silver censer to
the most exalted chamber of the Holy Mantle of the Prophet, [in the] year 1208 [1793/4].”
This is an inscription from an eighteenth-century incense burner donated by Sultan Selim
III (r. 1789–1807) to the Has Oda (Privy Chamber), where the sacred relics of the Prophet
Muhammad is kept in the Topkapı Palace since the sixteenth century. The inscription
clearly shows a very strong symbolic link that olfactory practices could forge between
donor and beneficiary, across vast temporal and geographical distances. Islam attributes
great importance to “pleasant” scent. Similar to other Muslim societies, the Ottomans used
perfume and fragrances frequently in both public and residential spaces, such as mosques,
tombs, and houses. Visual sources depict censers in residential spaces such as mansions
of Ottoman elites including the sultan himself. In addition, primary sources describe the
olfactory practices in the Ottoman society.
Today, the Topkapı Palace Museum collection houses approximately 60 incense burners
in six different sections of the collection. This study examines Ottoman olfactory
traditions in residential spaces through a group of incense burners in the Topkapı Palace
collections and contextualizes the objects within their multisensory settings. To explain
various connotations of olfactory practice in residential spaces, this study focuses on the
Topkapı Palace as a case study. Rather than presenting a quantitative survey of the
censers in the collection of the Topkapı Palace, this paper offers general conclusions on
the published thirty censers’ form, function, and symbolic meaning following the detailed
analysis. Therefore, this research will hopefully contribute to the study of Ottoman
smellscape by bringing new perspectives to the meaning of olfactory usage in residential
spaces in the Ottoman world.
Christian Lange (Utrecht University)
Islamic Sensory History in the Early Modern Period
Islamic sensory history is an emerging field of study, with relatively few contributions to
date that focus on the early modern period. Yet, if there is something that can be
meaningfully described as an ‘Islamic’ sensory style, it is largely the product of the early
modern period, or more specifically, of the intellectual and material culture of the Balkanto-Bengal region during the time of the three so-called ‘gunpowder empires’ of the
Turkish Ottomans (1281–1924), the Persian Safavids (1501–1722) and the Indian
Mughals (1526–1858). It is also, arguably, during the early modern period that the
European imagination of the Orient and of Islam as the negative foil – or variously, the
inspirational counterpart – of the allegedly objective, rational and disembodied West
takes shape. Examining the case of the olfactory imagination in a variety of Islamically
coded discourses (mysticism, philosophy, traditionalism), this talk unfolds several of the
challenges that research on Islamic sensory history in the early modern period is faced
with.
The workshop was organized by:
Prof. Daniela Hacke and Dr. Luc Wodzicki
Department of Early Modern History
Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin
Koserstraße 20
14195 Berlin
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
nemos (May 8, 2024). (Past) Workshop: “The Mediterranean Senses” at Freie Universität, Berlin. NEMoS. Retrieved February 17, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/12rlo