Healing and Learning in the Fondaco: A Forgotten Network of Knowledge in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Mamluk and Ottoman Levant, 1400-1700

This two-year Fellowship will produce the first systematic study of an uncharted network of knowledge exchange connecting Christian and Islamicate states across the Mediterranean and Levant 1400-1700.

This network had its humble origin in a public health initiative of the Republic of Venice, first uncovered by Pugliano thanks to a Wellcome Trust Fellowship in Medical History.

Keen on protecting its commercial and political interests overseas, for three centuries Venice appointed physicians, surgeons and apothecaries to its colonies and outposts in the Mamluk Sultanate and the Ottoman Empire.

Tasked with guarding the health of Venices diplomats and merchants, in fact these medical servants used their positions as springboards for rich intellectual explorations that brought them in contact with local populations and traditions.

The proposed project aims to investigate how these diplomatic doctors turned into savants and, more ambitiously, how this network facilitated the development of key fields of scholarship in early modern Europe, notably natural history and antiquarianism, and how these were informed by the intellectual world of the Near East.

In so doing, the project will overturn the image of intellectual stagnation traditionally attributed to the post-medieval Mediterranean world, and reshape our understanding of the connected history of the region.

The project will significantly contribute to the development of the field of History of Science and Medicine in the host institution and European higher education.

It will also considerably advance the career of Valentina Pugliano, an experienced researcher educated internationally in the UK, Germany and the US.

The training provided by Ca Foscari and a secondment at Ko University, Istanbul, the international networks of these two institutions, and the projects output, will cement Puglianos reputation as emerging scholar and increase her chances of securing an ERC grant and a position at a European university.