Overview

This book discusses the only known private book collection from pre-Ottoman Jerusalem for which we have a trail of documents. It belonged to an otherwise unknown resident, Burhn al-Dn; after his death, his books were sold in a public auction and the list of objects sold has survived.This list edited and translated in this volume shows that a humble part-time reciter of the late 14th century had almost 300 books in his house, evidence that book ownership extended beyond the elite. Based on a corpus of almost fifty documents from the aram al-sharf collection in Jerusalem, it is also possible to get a rare insight into the social world of such an individual. Finally, the book gives a unique insight into book prices as it will make available the largest such set of data for the pre-Ottoman period.

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9781474492072

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Aljoumani and Hirschler present an intervention in current scholarship that builds masterfully on their earlier achievements and that at the same time allows them to penetrate in unprecedented depth beyond the classical master-narratives of state, archive, and library, and into the intriguingly rich processes that made for everyday urban life in the medieval Middle East. --Jo Van Steenbergen, Ghent University Hirschler and Aljoumani transform a seemingly humble library inventory into a window on a lost written culture - a window that allows us to glimpse a wide network of social exchange. The important findings of this book and the provocative questions it raises will keep historians busy for a long time. --Ahmed El Shamsy, University of Chicago

Author Information

Said Aljoumani is Research Associate at Universität Hamburg (Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures) and holds a PhD in Library Studies from Cairo University. He is the author of numerous journal articles as well as books in Arabic such as The Oeuvre of Ibn Abd al-Hadi and his Contribution to Preserving Intellectual Heritage (Brill, 2021), The Library of a Madrasa in Aleppo at the End of the Ottoman Era (German Orient Institute Beirut, 2020; awarded the 2021 Book Price of the Middle East Librarians Association) and Syrian Libraries in the Zangid and Ayyubid Era (Damascus: Dar Nur Hawran, 2014). Konrad Hirschler is Professor of Middle Eastern History at Universität Hamburg (Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures) and previously held professorships of Middle Eastern History at SOAS (University of London) and Freie Universität Berlin. He is amongst others author of award-winning books such as A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture - The Library of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī (EUP, 2020), Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library (EUP, 2016), The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands: A Social and Cultural History of Reading Practices (EUP, 2012) and Medieval Arabic Historiography: Authors as Actors (Routledge, 2006).

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