Owning Books and Preserving Documents in Medieval Jerusalem: The Library of Burhan al-Din By Said Aljoumani and Konrad Hirschler

Extract

Owning Books and Preserving Documents in Medieval Jerusalem continues a series of important works about books and libraries in Greater Syria published by the two authors and it can be seen as the culmination of a trilogy of books, the first two of which were published by Hirschler in 2016 and 2020.¹ The three volumes together put our knowledge and understanding of book culture, literacy, and libraries of the pre-Ottoman era on a new level and will undoubtedly prove highly seminal in the field.

The present volume is a supreme example of what meticulous philological work can produce out of a bunch of rather unpromising documents. In the core of the investigation lies the Sale Booklet of the estate of a minor Qurʾān reciter and teacher, Burhān al-Dīn Ibrāhīm al-Nāṣirī, who died in 789/1387. The list mainly consists of books auctioned after the death of Burhān al-Dīn, who is otherwise unknown and never made his way to the narrative sources of the time and who does not seem to have written any scholarly works himself. This booklet comes from the al-Ḥaram al-sharīf archive, which also contains a network of other documents related to Burhān al-Dīn.