This collaboratory aims to facilitate research into the personal and professional trajectories and textual practices of dragomans (diplomatic interpreter-translators) employed by the Venetian consulate in Istanbul, from ca. 1550 to ca. 1750. More broadly, the project seeks to shed light on the role of dragomans -- an important yet surprisingly under-studied group -- in mediating sociopolitical and ethnolinguistic relations between the Ottoman and Venetian empires at a crucial point in their long entangled history.
In addition to making freely and openly available a range of data sets that can be dynamically edited, analyzed, and augmented, the Dragoman Renaissance Research Platform also seeks to model collaboration and resource sharing among scholars and students from a range of disciplinary perspectives interested in processes of cultural mediation in the early modern Mediterranean.
Principal Investigator: Natalie Rothman