Of Waqfs and Worms: The Khalidiyya Through Its Manuscript Notes
~ due to daylight savings, the correct time for this event in Palestine is 7pm, 19 MAR 21 ~
Boris Liebrenz will give an introduction to documentary manuscript notes and their usefulness for the study of libraries such as the Khalidiya. As was customary in the book cultures of the Islamic world, the volumes in the Khalidiya are full of traces of their former lives. Notes of owners, readers, endowments, and the like connect its manuscripts with people, institutions, and traditions. Liebrenz will present pertinent examples, show the trajectories through which specific volumes ended up with the Khalidi family, and thus join the Khalidiya to the wider book culture of the region with roots that at times extended many centuries into the past.
After Liebrenz’s talk, Marina Rustow will give commentary. We will close with a Q&A session.
This conversation is part of the Center’s series Readings in the Khalidiyya which investigates new scholarly inquires into manuscript collections such as the Khalidiyya.
Boris Liebrenz studied history and Arabic philology at Leipzig University and is a research fellow at the Bibliotheca Arabica project. His publications explore documentary and manuscript sources from several eras, from early Arabic papyri to 18th-century merchant letters. His second book, Die Rifāʽīya aus Damaskus: Eine Privatbibliothek im osmanischen Syrien und ihr kulturelles Umfeld (Leiden: Brill, 2016), was awarded the Annemarie Schimmel Research Prize in 2017. Recent projects include an edited volume The History of Books and Collections through Manuscript Notes (special issue of the Journal of Islamic Manuscripts, 2018), The Waqf of a Physician in Late Mamluk Damascus (Berlin: EB, 2019), and a forthcoming edition and study of an Aleppine weaver’s notebook (with Kristina Richardson, to appear in the Bibliotheca Islamica series of the Orient Institut Beirut). After postdoctoral positions in Bonn, Berlin, and New York City, Liebrenz returned to Leipzig and the Bibliotheca Arabica and is working on the micro-historical sub-project Libraries between the Mamluk and Ottoman Era. His commitment, as well as his passion, is to unearth the history of manuscripts and collections, and to identify the people and institutions connected with them, through the wide variety of manuscript notes.
Marina Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Departments of Near Eastern Studies and History at Princeton University, Director of the Program in Near Eastern Studies and Director of the Princeton Geniza Lab. Rustow is a social historian of the medieval Middle East who works with a relatively neglected type of source: documents, especially sources from the Cairo Geniza, and with Arabic papyri and paper documents from other sources. Most of Rustow’s research has centered on Egypt and Syria from the tenth century to the fifteenth, with occasional forays into Europe and modernity. Rustow is the author of The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton University Press, 2020), in which she tells the story of the lost archive of the Fatimid caliphate (909–1171) and invites us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that before 1500 the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents, and preserved even fewer.
For Rustow’s complete bio, click here.
