Title: A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture The Library of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī
Published: Edinburgh Studies in Classical Islamic History and Culture. November 2019
ISBN: 9781474451598 (PDF)
Reassembles the books of a medieval Arabic library that are today dispersed around the world Sets out a new approach to the study of Arabic book culture
Edits the most important Arabic medieval book list
Provides a new angle on the history of ḥadīth in the late-medieval period
Reconceptualises the mobility of endowed books
Reproduces the entire catalogue in colour
In the late medieval period, manuscripts galore circulated in Middle Eastern libraries. Yet very few book collections have come down to us as such or have left a documentary trail. This book discusses the largest private book collection of the pre-Ottoman Arabic Middle East for which we have both a paper trail and a surviving corpus of the manuscripts that once sat on its shelves: the Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī Library of Damascus. The book suggests that this library was part of the owner’s symbolic strategy to monumentalise a vanishing world of scholarship bound to his life, family, quarter and home city.
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