Seminar series "At the Intersection of Multiple Memories. Collecting Manuscripts in Early Modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire: The Marsili Case."

Led by experts and scholars on the history of the book in Muslim societies, the formation of oriental manuscript collections in early modern Europe, and Luigi Ferdinando Marsili (d. 1730) himself, the seminars will explore various aspects of the Marsili collection of Islamic manuscripts now in the University Library of the University of Bologna.

The collection is, in its present state, a space in which multiple memories are interwoven: the one of individual books whose material and textual traces reveal complex life trajectories; the one of an entire Ottoman library; that of the ‘mufti’ of Buda, which had an existence of its own before being transferred to Bologna where, today, it constitutes an important nucleus of the same collection; and finally, the memory of a local project, Marsili's himself, linked to the foundation of the Institute of Sciences (1711) and his personal discovery of the Ottoman world. The aim is for students to have the opportunity to familiarise with the layered memories of this collection while learning about the multiple approaches through which such a collection can be studied.

The programme includes six meetings: three between March and May 2025, and three between November and December 2025. The last meeting (December 2025) will be held directly in the special collection of the University Library of Bologna. Here students will have the opportunity to see a selection of Islamic manuscripts at close quarters and directly confront the materials studied during the seminar cycle.