Marinos Sariyannis is Research Director in the Institute for Mediterranean Studies/ FORTH in Rethymno, Greece. He has published more than forty papers and book chapters on Ottoman social, cultural and intellectual history. His recent books include A History of Ottoman Political Thought Up to the Early Nineteenth Century (Leiden 2019), Perceptions ottomanes du surnaturel. Aspects de l’histoire intellectuelle d’une culture islamique à l’époque moderne (Paris 2019), The Horizons, Limits, and Taxonomies of Ottoman Knowledge (Berlin 2021), and Ottomans and the Supernatural: Nature, the Hereafter, and the Limits of Knowledge in the Ottoman Empire (Oxford, forthcoming).

Ekin Tuşalp Atiyas has a PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University and is currently a researcher at the Center for Humanities (CHAM), Universidade NOVA de Lisboa. She is a historian of the Ottoman seventeenth century and focuses on the intersections of language, literature, political culture and legal history. She has published various articles based on her dissertation on the Ottoman scribal culture in the seventeenth century in the journal Turcica (2017) and other edited volumes (2021, 2023). She also contributed to the volume A History of Ottoman Political Thought Up to the Early Nineteenth Century (Brill, 2019) with the chapter “The Sunna-Minded Trend in Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Political Thought.”

Dimitris Giagtzoglou is a PhD candidate in Ottoman History at the University of Crete. He has received a doctoral fellowship for conducting research inside the ERC Consolidator Grant 2017 project titled “GHOST - Geographies and Histories of the Ottoman Supernatural Tradition: Exploring Magic, the Marvelous, and the Strange in Ottoman Mentalities”. His last article “Political advice and ethics in an occult framework: Alai Muhibbi Şirazi’s Düstûru’lvüzerâ as an example of 16th century Ottoman lettrism” was published in final volume of Aca’ib: Occasional Papers on the Ottoman Perceptions of the Supernatural, Vol. 4, (2024).

“Libraries are supposed to be silent places that do not lend themselves to conversation, yet they may be the place of conversation par excellence. Letters, on the other hand, constitute a conversation written down for an eternity, short or long. Three co-authors writing a study of letters, in a volume devoted to libraries, is a conversation upon conversation - an excellent path toward knowledge. We are glad, moreover, that we participate to the Conversation created by chapters of different authors in this volume - a library in itself.”

Marinos Sariyannis