Éva Á. Csató, Gunilla Gren-Eklund, Lars Johanson, Birsel Karakoç (eds): Turcologica Upsaliensia: An Illustrated Collection of Essays. Leiden and Boston: Brill 2020. 267 pages, illustrated, with a fold-out map. Hardback €119.00. ISBN 978-90-04-43570-4.

Abstract

The 'special relationship' between Sweden and the Turkic world is often noted for its political entanglements with the Russian-Ottoman rivalry in the early modern period, but it is no less manifest in centuries of Nordic scholarship on Central Asia and the Middle East. The current volume brings together seventeen different perspectives on the study of 'Oriental languages' at Uppsala university from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.The 'Orient' was always an elastic term. European geographers and travelers in the early Modern period defined it in different ways: for some, it began somewhere along the Ottoman frontier on the upper Danube, for others, east of where the historical impact of Latin language and literature and the Roman church ended; a definition that was further complicated by Protestantism and the articulation of a north/south cultural divide within Europe itself.At Uppsala, a chair of Hebrew and Greek was installed in 1605. As Gunilla Gren-Eklund shows in the first chapter, focus gradually expanded from 'Oriental' languages that were considered essential for the understanding of Biblical history and texts, to those that were relevant to contemporary affairs -especially the growing diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire. After a while, the Carolina Rediviva collections were expanded with donations and acquisitions by travelers such as Ravius (1613-77), Rålamb (1622-98) and Sparwenfeld (1655-1727). Per Cullhed gives an overview of how the collections grew in scope and focus thanks to the eighteenth-century travelers, and of the nineteenth-century scholarship that went into their cataloguing. The chapter also provides a background to the Swedish political ambitions that sometimes directed the early efforts to collect materials from near and afar, not least the promotion of the alleged 'Gothic' origins of Sweden itself.In the period that followed, it was not only diplomatic relations with the Ottomans that motivated an increased study of Turcic languages and cultures. As Lars Johanson stresses in his chapter, Swedish prisoners of war in Russia after the defeat at Poltava in 1709 established contacts with Turcic peoples in Siberia and made groundbreaking contributions to the study of Central Asia. Strahlenberg (1676-1747) used his eleven years of captivity in Tobolsk to draw a defining map of Siberia, and a few years after his return to Sweden he published a study of "Tatar dialects" -a milestone in the emergence of Ural-Altaic studies.The fascinating career of Christian Ravius and his role as professor at Uppsala (1650-56, 1659-69) are the subject of a chapter by Josef Eskhult, whereas Hans Helander, after discussing negative views of Turks in modern Latin literature, focuses on a 1674 speech by Ravius's disciple Gustaf Peringer (1651-1710), in which the later professor of Oriental languages voiced his opinion on why the field was so important and worthy of study. Éva Ágnes Czató further examines Peringer's interest in Karaim Jews; both chapters show Peringer as a key figure at a historica...