Non-Professional Expertise: On the Early Modern Transformations in Armenian Manuscript Production Viewed from Ottoman Tokat and Crimea

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the widespread destruction and population displacements caused by the Ottoman-Safavid wars and the Celali revolts plunged Armenian communities of Anatolia and the Caucasus into a profound crisis. The crisis extended to manuscript production, as the devastation of monastic scriptoria resulted in a severe shortage of books. Yet the same period also witnessed the proliferation and growing affluence of Armenian merchant communities, along with merchants’ increasing involvement in book production. This article examines the experience of Step‘anos of Tokat, a refugee priest, poet, and manuscript-maker with strong links to Tokat’s trade community, to explore the social history of Armenian manuscript production and the transformation of the ‘scribe’ from a copyist-artisan working as part of a monastic scriptorium to a mobile expert-entrepreneur serendipitously placed in a privileged position by the crisis in book production.