This year’s Book History Graduate Essay Award goes to Kathryn A. Schwartz, for her essay titled “Did Ottoman Sultans Ban Print?” The entire field of the history of the book in the Ottoman Empire rests on a deeply-rooted and longstanding fallacy, that is, the idea that Ottoman sultans at some point in the fifteenth or sixteenth century ‘banned’ print. In this article, Schwartz provocatively and convincingly argues that the accepted interpretation of an ordinance banning print has no documentary basis.
Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing
