Belonging to the field of intellectual history, but closely related to other complementary fields like literature, philosophy and theology, my research aims at answering the following question: is there an “Oriental history” that appears between 1671 and 1734? Understood as the European writing of the history of the Orient, the “Oriental history” has, so far, not drawn the researchers’ interest, though it may contribute to a better understanding of the concept of “universal history”, which is central to Enlightenment. My research is based on a corpus of three works written by authors coming from different cultural backgrounds, namely Jean-François Bernier, Judas Thaddeus Krusiński and Dimitrie Cantemir. Though belonging to different genres (travel account, chronicle), the three works share the focus on the crises undergone by the great Muslim Empires of the Orient. My study of the three texts will rely on a comparative approach that, among others, will use concepts like passions and interests.

A full-length study is available here.