A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture

Hirschler’s book is an excellent and extremely insightful reminder of how much these centuries-old monuments still influence our scholarly present.Two sets of plates (one documenting Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi’s innovations and the second a facsimile of the original manuscript), a bibliography, a general index, and indices of titles and authors round out what can only be described as a book monument to a monument of books and will be of special interest to those interested in the history of books and libraries. -- Hirschler, Konrad - Edinburgh University * A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture: The Library of Ibn 'Abd al-Hadi *
Konrad Hirschler’s Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture: The Library of Ibn ʻAbd al-Hādī is a detailed study of a late medieval Damascene library. The study breaks new methodological and conceptual grounds in the study of Middle Eastern manuscript libraries from the Medieval period to the present.Two sets of plates (one documenting Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi’s innovations and the second a facsimile of the original manuscript), a bibliography, a general index, and indices of titles and authors round out what can only be described as a book monument to a monument of books and will be of special interest to those interested in the history of books and libraries. -- Hirschler, Konrad - Edinburgh University * A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture: The Library of Ibn 'Abd al-Hadi *
Hirschler’s Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture demonstrates exceptionally well how rich and revealing at first sight dull traces from the past – in this case, a late-15th century list of books – are, at least if approached with the kind of methodological and heuristic creativity and rigour that have become a hallmark of Hirschler’s scholarship.Hirschler develops a carefully and innovatively constructed argument about how complex realities and meanings of intellectual, library and book practices in late medieval Damascus inform at the same time about highly localised phenomena and about their much wider value to understand transformations across time and space. This book is therefore not only a much needed contribution to current understandings of the social and intellectual milieus of late medieval Damascus. It is itself a monument to how a turn to combining history and material philology is substantially refining, and changing, modern imaginations of Middle Eastern and Islamic history in general. -- Jo Van Steenbergen, Ghent University