Founded in Cairo in the year 797/1395, the Maḥmūdīyah Library would become the largest public library in 9th/15th century Mamluk Egypt. Studies on Islamic manuscript libraries have only mentioned this important institution in passing based on what little can be gleaned from the narrative sources. However, these studies have neglected the wealth of information available on the numerous surviving manuscripts from this library now scattered in collections around the world. By analyzing various notes on this manuscript corpus and corroborating my findings with archival and narrative sources, I show the more sordid history behind the creation of this madrasa library. A story emerges of Maḥmūd al-Ustādār, a corrupt emir in the Mamluk administration who, despite his innocuous claim to wish to create a library “for the students of the noble science [of ḥadīth] to benefit from”, was also motivated to by a desire to protect his books from being confiscated by the sultan Barqūq shortly before his arrest. Tracing the circulation history of the Maḥmūdīyah corpus further back, I show how this Maḥmūd had seized these books from the inheritance left to the orphaned son of the former Grand Shāfiʿī Judge of Egypt Burhān al-Dīn Ibrāhīm ibn Jamāʿah. Finally, by looking at some earlier notes on the manuscript corpus, I offer some reasons why the judge Ibrāhīm ibn Jamāʿah had collected these specific books over the course of his life before they passed on to his son, then the emir Maḥmūd, and finally the shelves of the Maḥmūdīyah Library. This paper contributes to our understanding of religious endowment practices in the Mamluk period as well as the field of book culture in the manuscript age, showing the often hazy boundary between the concept of public and private ownership of books. It also invites future researchers to consider the value of paratextual data on Islamic manuscripts as a rich source for social, intellectual, and institutional history.

The political and cultural relations between Byzantium and the nascent Ottoman realm were often marked by hostilities. However, that substantial contact on all levels nonetheless happened is also true. The reception of classical Greek authors such as Aristotle in Arabic literature by means of a number of early translations is well known. The converse presence of Arabic literature in the Byzantine capital is much less attested, nor is it widely expected. Could Aristotle have returned to the center of Greek culture in an Arab garb? Who would have been the audience of this translation? Who would have brought it there and for what purpose? A manuscript now preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris shows that, indeed, at least one early Ottoman scholar studied his Aristotle in Constantinople long before it was conquered by the a descendent of his sultan. This talk will showcase the use of minute manuscript notes as means to provide broader context, sometimes a surprising one, for the literature that scholarship tends to study as disembodied texts. The trajectories of manuscripts, but also the lives of their owners and readers, can reveal unexpected connections or complicate modern assumptions of textual histories.

In the early 20th century, philologists and editors of Arabic manuscripts made use of photographic reproduction in their work. But did photography really push manual copyists out of business, as the Russian orientalist Krachkovsky stated in his memoirs? In this paper, I will present a case study of how manual copying and photographic copying were used by the Egyptian collector Ahmad Taymur (d. 1930). I will show that, rather than being a competition to manual copyists, photographic technology complemented their work—and was used only in specific circumstances. This remained the case even when the now largely forgotten Photostat made photographic reproduction easier, cheaper, and faster in the 1920s. I will introduce this contraption and demonstrate how these reproductions allow us to track manuscripts that have since been moved to libraries in Cairo, Dublin, and elsewhere.