The Limits of Reason: Early Modern Armenian Print Culture and the Occult

This paper seeks to examine how burgeoning Armenian book markets encouraged certain conceptualizations and categorizations of the occult sciences to develop during the early modern period. Among other scholars, Paolo Rossi and Elizabeth Eisenstein have suggested that the printing press suddenly brought a vast “underworld of learning” into public scrutiny in often unlikely pairings with other bodies of knowledge and science until the early 17^th century. Consequently, the subject of my study is how the printed book brought “hidden” knowledge of the occult to particular Armenian interpretive communities in conceptual ways that may not have been possible prior to the rise of the printing press.

Although I will trace the development of the occult across a wide corpus of printed materials, in particular I will focus on the publication and reception of Khatchatur Erzrumetsi's (1666-1740) encyclopedic compendium of philosophy in the early 18^th century. Erzrumetsi, an Armenian Catholic theologian who had received his education in Rome, brought together and even versified his vast understanding of various branches of science—including a detailed investigation of astrology—which consequently incurred the sardonic scorn of other intellectuals in the Armenian church. I will suggest that the study of the occult's relationship to print culture can offer historians rich insight into various epistemic tensions between Armenian Catholic, Apostolic, and mercantile interpretive communities. The stakes of these discursive battles were no less than what constitutes acceptable bodies of knowledge in the first place: where the limits of reason are marked, and who marks them.