Making Tools for Transmission: Mamluk and Ottoman Cairo's Papermakers, Copyists and Booksellers (original) (raw)
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Literary Snippets: Colophons Across Space and Time, 2023
The Cairo Genizah is famous as a source of manuscripts for the study of the medieval Mediterranean world, especially Jewish communities during the High Middle Ages. However, among the hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern manuscript fragments in Genizah collections are more than 12,000 moveable-type printed items, most of which come from Europe. They are the remnants of a significant trade in Hebrew-script books that crossed the Mediterranean in the centuries following Gutenberg’s printing press. This corpus is severely understudied, with few previous surveys of printed Genizah material and no systematic cataloguing data currently available to organise it. This article takes several steps to rectify this situation by examining 57 printers’ colophons in Genizah collections. The resulting analysis allows a preliminary reconstruction of the European and Ottoman networks through which Cairene Jews obtained Hebrew books between 1500 and 1900. This paper also serves as an introduction to Hebrew printing for Cairo Genizah scholars and an introduction to the Cairo Genizah for specialists in Hebrew printing. This article comes from the Gorgias Press book, "Literary Snippets: Colophons Across Space and Time" (eds. George Anton Kiraz and Sabine Schmidtke). The full book can be downloaded from this link: https://www.gorgiaspress.com/images/uploaded/Gorgias%20Open%20Repository/978-1-4632-4400-2\_QAOK.pdf
THE PHENOMENAL RISE OF BOOKMAKING IN MEDIEVAL ISLAM
By the year 1000 we are faced with an increase in the numbers of Islamic books that is astonishing. The three great royal libraries of fame were those of (a) the . Abbasid Caliph, al-Mamun (reigned 813-833) (1); (b) Umayyad· , al-Hakam II of Spain (reigned 961-976) which had 6~0 ,000 volumes, the catalogue alone filling 44 volumes of 20 leaves (40 pages) each (2); and (c) the Fatamid, al-Hakim founded by 1005 in Cairo had, and estimates vary, from 120,000 to 601,000 volumes (3), All three libraries employed staff to keep the libraries in order, to translate, copy, illuminate, and bind or repair the bindings of the books (4). These totals contrast vividly with that of the royal library of France with 900 books in the 13th and 14th centuries ( 5),
Book lists from the Cairo Genizah: a window on the production of texts in the middle ages
The historicity of books – their role as a force in history – has been addressed in postwar literary studies from different perspectives and across various disciplines. Nevertheless, the scholarship on the history of the book in medieval Islam is still relatively sparse, even though this society underwent a thorough process of textualization. But even authors who do consider the social and cultural role of books in medieval Islam look only at the production and consumption of Arabic books within the boundaries of Muslim society, relying on Islamic sources which reflect mainly the courtly milieu of scribes and secretariats. None discuss books produced and consumed by the religious minorities that were an indispensable part of this society, and none have made use of the abundant Genizah documents as source material. In the present programmatic article , I call attention to the many book lists found in the Cairo Genizah and to their potential as significant tools for developing a better understanding of the cultural and social history of the medieval Islamicate world.
The historicity of bookstheir role as a force in historyhas been addressed in post-war literary studies from different perspectives and across various disciplines. Nevertheless, the scholarship on the history of the book in medieval Islam is still relatively sparse, even though this society underwent a thorough process of textualization. But even authors who do consider the social and cultural role of books in medieval Islam look only at the production and consumption of Arabic books within the boundaries of Muslim society, relying on Islamic sources which reflect mainly the courtly milieu of scribes and secretariats. None discuss books produced and consumed by the religious minorities that were an indispensable part of this society, and none have made use of the abundant Genizah documents as source material. In the present programmatic article, I call attention to the many book lists found in the Cairo Genizah and to their potential as significant tools for developing a better understanding of the cultural and social history of the medieval Islamicate world.
Arab Booksellers and Bookshops in the Age of Printing, 1850-1914 - BJMES, 2010
The emergence of massive printing in the Arab Middle East in the nineteenth century entailed a multiple set of changes. As well as the production of written texts in unprecedented quantities and the rise of a big reading public, that historic shift also gave birth to a range of diffusion channels-from bookshops to public libraries and from newspaper agents to reading clubs-which carried the printed works to their audiences. This article examines a small section of this scene: the growth, spreading and changing characteristics of book dealerships and bookshops in the Arab Ottoman provinces during the formative half-century prior to World War I. Exploring this mechanism casts light on the nature and pace of printing assimilation in the region, projecting it as a rather dramatic makeover.
Printing Arabic Manuscripts in the Sixteenth Century
Manuscripts and Arabic-Script Manuscripts in Africa, eds. Stewart, Charles, and Ahmed Chaouki Binebine. The Islamic Manuscript Association, 2023
This chapter examines the history of the sixteenth-century intellectual and professional networks that originated around the activities of the Medici Oriental Press, established in Rome in 1584. The Press collected prestigious manuscript editions in North Africa and the Middle East (including al-Idrīsī’s Descriptive Geography and Ibn Sīnā’s Canon) based on their perceived aesthetic qualities and the benefits of their content. Additionally, it recruited experts from the region who would collaborate with orientalists and printers in Rome to produce books visually similar to manuscripts, which were then to be sold across the Ottoman provinces and beyond. I reconstruct the journey of such texts and the individuals who made the Medici venture possible, from the selection and collection of the manuscripts, through the production of Arabic typefaces and printed editions, to attempts to sell the final products. I focus in particular on the power structures involved in the Medici project. I retrace how specific notions of aesthetic value that were attached to the manuscripts affected their printed renditions, and examine the individual relations and political forces that shaped this early and virtually unprecedented instance of printed Arabic.
Browsing through the Sultan's Bookshelves. Towards a Reconstruction of the Library of the Mamluk Sultan Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī (r. 906-922/1501-1516) [Mamluk Studies, Vol. 26] (Bonn University Press), 2021
Starting from 135 manuscripts that were once part of the library of the late Mamluk sultan Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī (r. 1501–1516), this book challenges the dominant narrative of a “post-court era”, in which courts were increasingly marginalized in the field of adab. Rather than being the literary barren field that much of the Arabic and Arabic-centred sources, produced extra muros, would have us believe, it re-cognizes Qāniṣawh’s court as a rich and vibrant literary site and a cosmopolitan hub in a burgeoning Turkic literary ecumene. It also re-centres the ruler himself within this court. No longer the passive object of panegyric or the source of patronage alone, Qāniṣawh has an authorial voice in his own right, one that is idiosyncratic yet in conversation with other voices. As such, while this book is first and foremost a book about books, it is one that consciously aspires to be more than that: a book about a library, and, ultimately, a book about the man behind the library, Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī. Open access since April 2024! Also downloadable through https://bonndoc.ulb.uni-bonn.de/xmlui/handle/20.500.11811/11485