Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library: The Ashrafiya Library Catalogue (Edinburgh Studies in Classical) - Softcover

"This is a tour de force of ferocious codex dissection, relentless bibliographical probing, and imaginative reconstructive storytelling. The trajectory of an urban public library whose holdings shed light on the intellectual milieu of thirteenth-century Damascus comes to light through Hirschler's sensible and comparative lens. Our knowledge of medieval Arabic book culture, library culture and reading culture is significantly enriched." -- Li Guo, University of Notre Dame"Konrad Hirschler's Medieval Damascus offers a unique insight...Scholars of Middle Eastern literacy and literature will be trawling Medieval Damascus for some time to come. And from a wider perspective, because Damascus's old libraries were thoroughly dispersed and destroyed, this book at last allows us to see what kind of people called medieval Damascus their home." -- Peter Webb, Times Literary Supplement "Provides a unique insight into the pre-print world of books in the Middle East." -- Stephan Conermann, Sehepunkte 16/7-8

The written text was a pervasive feature of cultural practices in the medieval Middle East. At the heart of book circulation stood libraries that experienced a rapid expansion from the twelfth century onwards. While the existence of these libraries is well known our knowledge of their content and structure has been very limited as hardly any medieval Arabic catalogues have been preserved. This book discusses the largest and earliest medieval library of the Middle East for which we have documentation - the Ashrafiya library in the very centre of Damascus - and edits its catalogue. This catalogue shows that even book collections attached to Sunni religious institutions could hold rather unexpected titles, such as stories from the 1001 Nights, manuals for traders, medical handbooks, Shiite prayers, love poetry and texts extolling wine consumption. At the same time this library catalogue decisively expands our knowledge of how the books were spatially organised on the bookshelves of such a large medieval library. With over 2,000 entries this catalogue is essential reading for anybody interested in the cultural and intellectual history of Arabic societies. Setting the Ashrafiya catalogue into a comparative perspective with contemporaneous libraries on the British Isles this book opens new perspectives for the study of medieval libraries.