Conceptions of madness and melancholy in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire

This thesis examines the conceptions of madness and mental conditions such as mal-i hülya or melancholy in the 17th- and 18th-century Ottoman world from the perspective of two bodies of knowledge: medicine and Sufism. The primary aim of this study is to provide a detailed analysis of medical and Sufi sources regarding madness in the early modern Ottoman Empire. At the same time, the thesis also draws attention to the complex relationships between Sufis and physicians as actors, stresses the interconnected nature of Sufism and medicine as bodies of knowledge, and highlights the similarities (and differences) in their approaches to mental illnesses in the early modern Ottoman world. A third and final contribution of the thesis is to complement the study of medical and Sufi sources with a foray into Ottoman dictionaries to uncover the rich terminology that early modern Ottomans used to define mental conditions.