This chapter summarizes recent trends and future possibilities in Ottoman cultural history with two main foci. First, we underline the potential of cultural history to go beyond formal categories (such as occupation, ethnicity, or religion), specifically through the concept of emotional communities. Second, we highlight performance studies as a fruitful venue of study that challenges the reduction of culture to written texts, with a particular emphasis on the aural dimensions of history. Together, these two approaches challenge presuppositions about a monolithic, single Ottoman culture. While highlighting methodological insights from the broader subfields of performance studies, sound studies, and the history of emotions, we simultaneously underline the specific challenges of applying these methods in Ottoman history.

The terms ‘salon’ and ‘circle’ refer to a particular type of literary group that has shaped Russian culture since the seventeenth century, with its influence peaking in the 1820s and 1830s. Unlike literary societies, these communities have rarely had any formal membership, written rules or programmatic documents. Instead, they have tended to favour friendly chats on various subjects, literary recitations, and discussions on certain days of week, sometimes accompanied by musical performances. These practices engender strong personal bonds and shared memories. Some of these communities have created their own ‘circle languages’ with recurrent motifs, inside jokes, and domestic mythologies, which in turn have framed their literary output. The chapter reconstructs their activities by examining that output alongside secret-police reports. Viewed from this perspective, the history of literary circles and salons can be seen as the history of the vanished ‘everyday life’ of their participants.

The focus of this chapter is Gregory’s ordering of exegetical, spiritual, administrative, intellectual, emotional, and gendered knowledge across his oeuvre. The sections are organised by genre into three groups according to the kind of knowledge ordered within. Gregory’s homilies and commentaries on scripture were primarily intended to convey exegetical knowledge within a framework that prioritised divine law as the primary ordering principle in the social hierarchy. His Pastoral Rule and the Dialogues both employed knowledge of the human passions to teach spiritual truths and offer practical advice for living a Christian life in emotional communities. Gregory’s many letters inscribed his strictly hierarchical social order, with special attention to networks of women of influence outside Rome. A constant feature across Gregory’s oeuvre was the coupling of spiritual and intellectual knowledge for the benefit of all levels of society and for the sake of the church.

Late Renaissance conflicts drew mercenaries of knowledge to act as informal mediators in a wide range of diplomatic interests and territories located around the Holy See. Since the sixteenth century, Rome had become a refuge for foreign subjects, many of whom Romanized themselves while securing their patrimonies across and beyond the city. Nogueira offered his services from Rome to patrons and correspondents in Paris and Lisbon as well as in the Eternal City. This chapter discusses the multivalent position he occupied as a bibliopolitician in Rome after his return from Bologna in 1640 and the beginnings of his involvement with the politics of the Portuguese Restoration.