Patricia Blessing's "Architecture and Material Politics in the Fifteenth-century Ottoman Empire"

Patricia Blessing is Assistant Professor of Islamic Art History at Princeton University. A scholar of Islamic architecture in the eastern Mediterranean, Iberian Peninsula, and Iran, she is the author of Rebuilding Anatolia after the Mongol Conquest.

Blessing applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Architecture and Material Politics in the Fifteenth-century Ottoman Empire, and reported the following:

Page 99 describes aspects of the relationship between Ottoman and Mamluk architecture in the fifteenth century, using the example of a building in Amasya, Turkey. The example here is the Bayezid Pasha Mosque, built in 1414. The text on the page describes elements of the building, provides historical context, and makes connections to other types of architecture that will be explored later in the chapter. The page also talks about who the patron was, and what his position was within the Ottoman elite, so explains how he came to commission a building like this in the first place.

The page gives a good idea about the book, with one big exception: there aren’t any images on it. Since the book is about architectural history, it features close to 170 images, most of them in color. Many of them are my own photographs, taken during my research trips. There are references to several images on this page, so a reader would at least know to expect them later on. From the text on the page, one can understand that Ottoman architecture is the main subject of the book, and that the fifteenth century plays a role. I am not sure to what extent a reader would understand that this period is at the core of the book project since the only other example of a building that is mentioned is a 14th-century one in Cairo.

Follow Patricia Blessing on Twitter.

--Marshal Zeringue