[T]his volume's great strength is its many original contributions to the study of the long sixteenth century. Those looking for the freshest new work on the classical age, along with a wonderful essay on nineteenth-century Ottoman historiography, will find this book a rich read.

Collectively, the essays in the volume merit recognition in their effort to recover the lesser-heard voices of Ottoman historiography while engaging with the question of how history writing was used in constructing, questioning, and negotiating what constituted 'Ottomanness' at certain critical historical moments. In so doing, the volume contributes to a wider understanding of the contexts of textual and visual production, reading, and using history that extend beyond the confines of the Ottoman Empire.

The cliché 'a gem of a book' holds true for this volume, as it is the crystallized form of seven Ottoman specialists' groundbreaking, extensive research.

[T]his edited book is highly recommended to scholars who are interested in early modern and modern Ottoman history writing.

[These essays] make a significant contribution to a relatively new strand of Ottoman research that takes as its subject Ottoman reading communities, literacy practices, and the roles that particular texts played in Ottoman society.

Each article has the potential to spark lively academic discussion and offer alternative vistas in Ottoman historiography . . . Such ground-breaking edited volumes will set the intellectual agenda for future studies as long as they adopt a rigorous methodological approach, as this volume clearly does.