ABSTRACT
Costume albums and books depicting the diverse peoples of the Ottoman Empire were produced by Ottomans and Europeans as early as the sixteenth century, defining geography, ethnicity, religion, occupation, and gender in the Ottoman Empire through costume. Being mobile objects, costume collections circulated through transimperial networks in the Mediterranean. Long understood as an enticing example of cross-cultural exchange, these costume compendia have nonetheless been interpreted in a lopsided way. Despite the early appearance of Ottoman-produced costume miniatures, most of the still embryonic writing on images of Ottoman costume assumes the priority of European print examples. But European artisans of the book were not without knowledge of Ottoman work: Ottoman-produced costume miniatures circulated in Europe beginning already in the sixteenth century, and increasingly through the seventeenth and especially eighteenth centuries. My chapter will explore how a consideration of the materiality of the costume book and album—specifically texture, touch, and the practice of hand-coloring—shapes a cross-cultural reading of them, a reading that is reinforced by early modern cultural constructions of color, especially in relation to textile and dress. This investigation defines cultural mediation as layered, discontinuous, and resulting from a multiplicity of points of contact and exchange.
