11 - Cross-Cultural Circulations and Orientalist Knowledge: Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale and its Editions

Summary

AS EARLIER CHAPTERS HAVE established in different ways, the revival of global approaches in historical research has brought fresh attention to transnational and long-distance connections and their impact on knowl-edge production. Consequently, the study of different modes and vectors in the interaction and circulation of ideas and knowledge, along with different ways of interpretation and reappropriation, have emerged as promising subjects of study. It has begun to be acknowledged that the cross-cultural encounters, and in particular the exchanges with Asiatic civilizations, have been crucial for the development of scholarly production in Europe during the early modern period. Some studies have addressed the role of Orien-talist scholars as intermediaries and suggested that their works opened up new perspectives for an understanding of eighteenth-century schol-arship. However, the study of Orientalist scholarship remains a marginal domain within that of the so-called ‘Republic of Letters’ and the mapping of these global, cross-cultural, boundary-crossing circulations needs further exploration.

This chapter therefore examines the circulation of Oriental knowledge in the Enlightenment, focusing on a major Orientalist work of the late seventeenth century, Barthélemy d’Herbelot's Bibliothèque orientale, and on its several later editions during the second half of the eighteenth century. This analysis engages with the intellectual as well as the material, situating them both in the context of Western scholarship and cross-cultural encounter during this critical period for the global history of Orientalist knowledge. Our purpose is, in the first place, to examine the diversity of agencies, spaces and practices involved in these editorial projects. The study thus focuses on the investigation of the interaction between local and long-distance exchange, the networks and practices involved in the making of the Bibliothèque orientale, and it particularly points out the role of local agency (Oriental scholars) and the involvement of non-academic actors, revealing unexpected places of knowledge production and circulation. Tracing the ways in which local knowledge is negotiated and reconfigured, this study shows that the perspective of the Bibliothèque orientale, in its various versions (and both the methodology of the authors and the editorial decisions that have given a new form to the work), places it at the intersection of different historiographical traditions (Ottoman, Arabic, Persian, Chinese, European).