OTTOLEGAL SIGNED

Project "OTTOLEGAL" data sheet

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 Project objective

This project investigates the formation of law in the Ottoman Empire between 1450 and 1650. Examining the religio-legal opinions (fetva) of scholars and decrees of sultans (kanun), it aims to expose the hybridity of Ottoman law by revealing the agency and interaction of diverse groups in the lawmaking process, moving beyond the well-known role of such actors as the government (the sultan and his representatives) and scholars to better understand the role of other, lesser-known actors like local groups with entrenched interests, non-Muslim communities, common people, founders of endowments, guilds, merchants, and others. Previous scholarship in the field has mainly utilized fetva and kanun as fixed legal categories, respectively representing the order of sacred law (sharia) and the will of the sultan. This project departs from this view, instead treating both fetva and kanun as malleable media that provided languages for the articulation and hybridization of diverse legal views. Approaching the study of the Ottoman legal history from a new perspective, OTTOLEGAL scrutinizes a large corpus of kanun and fetva texts with particular research questions that are expected to reveal the agency and interaction of multiple groups and their ideas in the formation of law. Additionally, the project aspires to develop a model of lawmaking that will account for diversity and change across time and space in early-modern societies. The OTTOLEGAL team will prepare a database with a web portal, including metadata, description, transliteration, translation, and essays of scholarly analysis for the key sources of the project. In addition, three monographs and one sourcebook will be written and published, and two international conferences will be organized and their papers published in two edited volumes. This project promises to recast the field of Ottoman legal history on the basis of a new perspective and open new frontiers in the study of history and law.