Aims
Centre for Ottoman Renaissance and Civilisation
Centre for Ottoman Renaissance and Civilisation (C.O.R.C.) is an independent research centre in Ottoman and Islamic history.
At C.O.R.C. our aim is to provide research to promote the global nature of the Renaissance. C.O.R.C. aims to provide a forum for the study of the Renaissance in a global context with added focus on the distinctive features of the Ottoman Renaissance and its affiliations with the Greco-Roman tradition. It encourages interdisciplinary studies of the early modern Mediterranean world that are cross-national and comparative to encourage interaction among academics from relevant and various traditions of learning. CORC is devoted to advanced study of the Ottoman Renaissance in all its aspects: the history of art; political, economic, and social history; the history of science, philosophy, and religion, and the history of literature and music.
The Ottoman Renaissance, which took place during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Bursa, Edirne and Istanbul, produced an extraordinary array of artworks in the form of monumental architecture, Iznik tiles, calligraphy and illustrated manuscripts. Notwithstanding the exceptional artistic production, Ottoman art and architecture have not received the same attention in historiography as, for instance, the celebrated Renaissance of Italy. Drawing upon notions of rebirth characteristic of renaissances more generally, this study seeks to situate early modern Ottoman art within a more global Renaissance context. The study recognises the cultural interaction and sharing of values across the Mediterranean basin that characterised the period yet examines Ottoman artistic expression through specifically Ottoman conceptions of rebirth. Ottoman ideas of rebirth although built on the classicism of Greece and Rome moved well beyond these legacies. Indeed, the notion of cultural rebirth (rinascita / ihya) uniquely contends that the Ottomans were much more focused on their Eastern (Turkic, Timurid, Persian) and Islamic heritage than that of the classical world which features in the West.
The Ottoman Renaissance is a topic of considerable originality, and one that contributes to a growing body of scholarship, cutting across multiple disciplines of the humanities, that has sought to expand the conceptual definition of "The Renaissance" in ways that include the artistic and cultural traditions of non-European societies during the early modern period. The specific focus of the Ottoman Renaissance is the development of Ottoman mosque and monumental tomb architecture, although in a way that also includes other decorative arts (such as Iznik ceramics, calligraphy, and the arts of the book), as well as several contemporary discussions of architecture and its intersection with both state ideology and cultural identity that were composed by Ottoman literati during the period under review.
Most scholarly works in this field have not directly addressed the nature and character of Ottoman Renaissance head on. It is distinctive because this typology as explained above is one that specialists in the study of Ottoman art and architecture have alluded to in the past, but research at C.O.R.C. aims to further the academic discussion to provide an lucid and systematic way that will engender considerable discussion and re-evaluate current understanding of "The Renaissance".
Director
Centre for Ottoman Renaissance and Civilisation
