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In terms of its aesthetic ideals—for example, its lack of a gender binary and inversion of a gender hierarchy—the Neoplatonic discourse theoretically allowed women to express love as speaking subjects. However, other than a few surviving examples of early modern women poets, this prestigious discourse was used predominantly by male poets. In other words, there seems to be a divergence between theory and practice. To investigate the paradoxical status of women, this chapter takes the case of Mihrî Hatun, an early modern Ottoman woman poet, to focus on the practice side of the equation. Beginning from the performative nature of poetry, this article highlights the social construction of gender in intimate homosocial literary spaces (the meclis in the Islamicate case) not usually open to privileged women. By examining the life and work of Mihrî Hatun, this article showcases the double process of celebration/legitimation and exceptionality/subversion in her poetry.

Since the 1950s, historiographical trends in scholarship have re-considered the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent nation-state building of the Republic of Turkey. The social and political evolution of the imperial system into a nation-state has been alternatively explained through geopolitical pressures, domestic resistance, the expanding economy and modernism in Europe, and the inability of the Ottoman establishment to cope with the rapid changes of the nineteenth century. Constructing one holistic narrative of a vast time period of upheaval is a difficult endeavor for any scholar. In the case of the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the Republic of Turkey, ethno-religious networks, two world wars, geopolitical competition between the great powers, regional and pan-regional insurgencies, demographic displacement, nationalist fervor sweeping through the Balkan and Arab provinces and into Anatolia, and finally the Kurdish armed resistance renders succinct historical narratives all but impossible to achieve. Thus, while there are many stories of the end of the Ottoman Empire, an overview of the issues for students and general audiences is a much needed, but audacious, undertaking. Yet for understanding the Middle East and Southeastern Europe today, a critical narrative must be told in all its complexity.

Ottoman women poets appear in the major biographical dictionaries produced throughout Ottoman literary history; however, unlike the overwhelming majority of male poets, their presence in these documents is justified or explained as something very unusual, and the stories of woman poets have been built up, over centuries, into a discourse dominated by the male dictionary writers. The first half of this article challenges this discourse, mapping its structure and proposing that it can no longer be taken at face value. In the second part, the article proposes a new approach, structured around an alternative set of categories for studying these biographical dictionaries—dictionaries which will remain the major sources for studying women poets until their own poetry can be fully deciphered and analyzed in relationship to each other.

The seductive stories of the 1001 Nights have entered the imagination of Europe at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when Antoine Galland first translated them into French. Galland started collecting manuscripts of the Nights in Aleppo,1 and continued his search in various places including the Ottoman capital Istanbul, where they had twice been translated into Ottoman Turkish in the seventeenth century.2