Edinburgh University Press Paperback English
A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture
The Library of Ibn ?Abd al-Hadi
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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 ?Abd al-Hadi Library of Damascus. The book suggests that this library was part of the owners symbolic strategy to monumentalise a vanishing world of scholarship bound to his life, family, quarter and home city.
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 ?Abd al-Hadi Library of Damascus. The book suggests that this library was part of the owners symbolic strategy to monumentalise a vanishing world of scholarship bound to his life, family, quarter and home city.