Scholarly Correspondence: A Window into the DNA of Scholarship

As consumers of scholarship we are as a rule limited to what has come down to us in published form. If we want to understand the DNA of the final product—what it was that prompted a scholar to approach a certain topic or problem, how he or she selected and analyzed the material at hand, and what guided him or her throughout the process—we need to get our hands on at least some of the material that reflects the genesis of the published work, and this in addition to taking into consideration the wider social, political, and intellectual context a scholar is working in, as well as the material and economic conditions the scholar in question was working under. One genre that is particularly conducive to allow insights into the scholarly production of knowledge is epistolary exchanges. The talk discusses the potential of these scholarly correspondences for the study of the historiography of "Oriental studies" writ large during the late modern period.