Owning Books and Preserving Documents in Medieval Jerusalem

Name: Owning Books and Preserving Documents in Medieval Jerusalem
Brand: Edinburgh University Press
Price: 69.4 AUD
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The Library of Burhan al-Din

By: Said Aljoumani, Konrad Hirschler

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Paperback | 11 March 2025

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394 Pages

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23.4 x 15.6

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Available: 11th March 2025

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This book discusses the only known private book collection from pre-Ottoman Jerusalem for which we have a trail of documents. It belonged to an otherwise unknown resident, Burhān al-Dīn; after his death, his books were sold in a public auction and the list of objects sold has survived.This list - edited and translated in this volume - shows that a humble part-time reciter of the late 14th century had almost 300 books in his house, evidence that book ownership extended beyond the elite. Based on a corpus of almost fifty documents from the Ḥaram al-sharīf collection in Jerusalem, it is also possible to get a rare insight into the social world of such an individual. Finally, the book gives a unique insight into book prices as it will make available the largest such set of data for the pre-Ottoman period.

Industry Reviews

Aljoumani and Hirschler present an intervention in current scholarship that builds masterfully on their earlier achievements and that at the same time allows them to penetrate in unprecedented depth beyond the classical master-narratives of state, archive, and library, and into the intriguingly rich processes that made for everyday urban life in the medieval Middle East.

--Jo Van Steenbergen, Ghent University

Hirschler and Aljoumani transform a seemingly humble library inventory into a window on a lost written culture - a window that allows us to glimpse a wide network of social exchange. The important findings of this book and the provocative questions it raises will keep historians busy for a long time.

--Ahmed El Shamsy, University of Chicago

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