Sir John Finch’s (1626–1682) and Dr John Covel’s (1638–1722) Sensory Experiences in the Ottoman Empire, 1660-1690

This dissertation examines the sensory dimensions of Anglo-Ottoman encounters in the seventeenth century through a micro-history of Sir John Finch (1626–1682) and Dr John Covel (1638–1722), two English travellers whose experiences in the Ottoman Empire were shaped by cultivated perception and scholarly discipline. It reconstructs how these individuals used trained sensory practices, rooted in anatomical training, empirical observation, and social status, to apprehend, interpret, and document the unfamiliar. Rather than offering sensationalist travel narratives, Finch and Covel produced scholarly and diplomatic writings that were informed by their intellectual and physical disciplines developed in England and Italy. Through their sensory engagement with the Ottoman world, they transformed cross-cultural encounters into narratives of knowledge and strategic forms of self-presentation. Finch developed a natural philosophical theory of perception grounded in anatomical materialism and empirical epistemology, arguing that all knowledge derived from the senses. His treatise on sensory experience proposed that perceptual habits, not innate biology, explained cultural differences. Covel approached travel as an empiricist and natural historian, cataloguing plants, insects, and soils as well as Ottoman music, technologies, and political rituals through multisensory investigation. His writings reveal the methodological rigour of a scholar who was not a transient traveller but a resident in the Ottoman Empire. He emerges as a deeply learned observer and voraciously curious and critical of all that he encountered. Together, Finch and Covel, as theorists and practitioners, exemplify intersecting modes of seeing, touching, hearing, smelling, and tasting the Ottoman world, shaped by culture, individual practice, and the status interactions of diplomacy. By integrating intellectual and cross-cultural travel and material histories, this study argues that sensory perception was not an unmediated filter but an active instrument of inquiry and negotiation. For Finch and Covel, scholarly and diplomatic engagements were pursued through shared sensory practices. Sensory encounter served as the foundation for cross-cultural perception, mediating the transformation of physical experience into interpretive understanding.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Dykstra-McCarthy, Jack

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Mandelbrote, Scott

• Early Modern Encounters
• History
• Sensory History

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/34aade23-84fb-4e89-949e-16927b87ade2/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.125129

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/395702