Courses

This course is designed to provide the foundations for exploring the rich and fascinating history of Islamic manuscripts from the 9th through the 19th century. Its structure is shaped mainly by thematic considerations in a notable chronological fashion. The meetings amount to a series of “cuts” through the topic and cover themes such as the paper revolution, authorship, scribal culture, technologies of book production, readers and their notes, libraries and book collections, or textual as well as extra-textual components of manuscripts. Over the semester, we will study key material, textual, and visual elements of Islamic book culture spanning many centuries and continents, and visit major historiographical questions on the millennium-long history of Islamic manuscript tradition before the widespread adoption of print technology.