Ebook: A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture: The Library of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī

Shortlisted for the 2020 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize in Middle Eastern Studies

Reassembles the books of a medieval Arabic library that are today dispersed around the world

• Sets out a new approach to the study of Arabic book culture
• Edits the most important Arabic medieval book list
• Provides a new angle on the history of ḥadīth in the late-medieval period
• Reconceptualises the mobility of endowed books
• Reproduces the entire catalogue in colour

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 ʿAbd al-Hādī Library of Damascus. The book suggests that this library was part of the owner’s symbolic strategy to monumentalise a vanishing world of scholarship bound to his life, family, quarter and home city.