ABSTRACT

A narrower aim is to demonstrate how the idea of love as an idea unrelated to past love theory in the specific example of early modern Ottoman culture and society can be seen to describe one, possibly central feature of an Ottoman emotional ecology. This study also relies on a way of organizing the word-types and images that make the Ottoman cultural vocabulary related to love. The idealized Ottoman garden, which includes actual gardens, imagined gardens and gardens portrayed in words and images, is an overarching cultural setting for the expression and acting-out of Ottoman emotional life. Ottoman love poetry is about emotion but it contextualizes, describes and defines emotions as part of an ecosystem represented by the garden that interconnects the material and spiritual, the this-worldly and the that-worldly, human ecology and natural ecology. An ecological emotion-historical perspective based on the theory of scripting can be a fruitful way of approaching Ottoman culture and its interactions with Ottoman society.