CSMC
CSMCCentre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures
5 Questions to...Konrad Hirschler
7 January 2022
In our new series, '5 Questions to…', members of CSMC chat about their background, current work, what motivates them – and about their favourite written artefacts. In this episode, we talk to Konrad Hirschler, spokesperson for ‘Archiving Artefacts’.
Konrad Hirschler, please tell us a little about yourself.
I started studying Economics at the age of 22 here at Universität Hamburg in 1993. A year later, I noticed that Islamic Studies was being offered as a subject at the university and after attending one lecture on early Islamic history, I immediately decided to switch degrees. After three more years in Hamburg and a year studying at Birzeit University, I moved to London where I first obtained my MA and then did a PhD in African/Asian History at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies. Following four post-doctoral years that I subsequently spent at Universität Kiel, I returned to London in 2007 and became Professor of Middle Eastern History in 2015. I moved to the Freie Universität Berlin in 2016 and ultimately returned to Hamburg again in 2021.
During my studies and my PhD, I wasn’t really interested in manuscripts as such. My interest only developed gradually in the course of my post-doctoral years when I became increasingly intrigued by the question of how to write a history of ‘medieval’ reading practices. This question led to my second monograph, The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands: A Social and Cultural History of Reading Practices. However, my real fascination with handwritten material was only triggered when I came across the oldest known Arabic library catalogue (from the thirteenth century) while working on that project. This led to my British Academy-funded research for my third monograph, Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library – The Ashrafiya Library Catalogue. My latest book, A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture – The Library of Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī, continues along these lines and deals with a highly idiosyncratic endowment list by Ibn ‘Abd al-Hadi, a fifteenth-century scholar, which is the largest pre-1500 endowment record of books in the Arab lands.
This last book focuses strongly on the ‘materiality’ of these (not particularly beautiful) composite manuscripts (a term I adopted from CSMC long before I joined the Centre). In a sense, my interest in reading practices slowly led me down the path of studying medieval libraries and book collections with an increasing focus on books as material objects. So returning to Hamburg and joining CSMC with its distinctive focus on the materiality of written artefacts feels like coming home in a number of ways.
In the traditional ‘lone-wolf’ world of the humanities, collaborations with colleagues working in fields like physics and chemistry are hideously difficult to start.
What project are you currently working on and how does it contribute to your field?
My main book project at the moment is a collaborative project with my colleague Said Aljoumani. Entitled Owning Books and Preserving Documents in Medieval Jerusalem – The Library of Burhan al-Din, it explores the bookshelves and the private archive of a minor scholar from fourteenth-century Jerusalem. The protagonist was a man of modest means whose routine life juggling numerous part-time positions as a reciter in his hometown of Jerusalem did not leave any traces behind in the chronicles of his period. Yet his death gave birth to a remarkable collection of inventories and lists. This collection consists of more than 50 documents that include wonderfully mundane stuff, such as marriage documents, divorce papers (he had at least two divorces), rent payments, the sale deed for his house, the neighbour granting him permission to build an extension to the building, and his wife buying kitchen equipment from him so he could actually afford the extension. Luckily for us, several documents on settling his estate have also survived, including a list of all the possessions that he left behind and that were auctioned off in Jerusalem on an autumn day in 1387. This list is a unique opportunity to open a door to the pre-print world of non-elite bookish and documentary practices, which has been largely invisible so far. It tells a tale of material objects (mostly books, but also pots and plates), of social aspiration, and of archival reconfigurations.
The book makes three main contributions to the field. Firstly, it expands the corpus of documented book collections we know of as there are very few documents on libraries and book ownership from the medieval Middle East that have come to light. This is a field of research that has only emerged over the last decade in a significant way. My book is also the last instalment of a trilogy on medieval book collections that includes my previous books on the Ashrafiya and Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī’s libraries. My main interest isn’t in studying such libraries primarily from a history-of-ideas perspective, but in thinking about what such collections of material objects meant to those who owned them, those who endowed them, and those who used them.
Secondly, our book addresses the debate on the extent of (bookish and pragmatic) literacy. We propose that the written word had become a central feature of almost all spheres of life in the region well beyond the elites by the fourteenth century. By combining the analysis of book ownership (and libraries) with the analysis of document use (and archiving) in one specific case study, this book takes a distinct approach that goes beyond established concepts in the field.
Finally, the argument the study makes is not just focused on books and documents. Rather, it also puts an emphasis on socio-cultural practices of establishing patronage–client relationships between members of the military and political elites on the one hand and members of wider society on the other. This argument is part of a broader rethinking of late medieval society in Egypt and Syria, in particular the gradual fading of the ‘state’ as an analytical category.
What are the main opportunities and challenges of working at a large, multidisciplinary research institution like CSMC in your opinion?
CSMC is an amazing place in terms of the diversity of its projects; people here are working on a variety of objects originating from across the world and from different time periods. There’s a unique chance to see one’s own work in relation to how researchers from other fields think about the same issues and how other societies have developed similar or strikingly different practices. One particular characteristic of CSMC is its strong emphasis on bringing the natural sciences and humanities together. Consequently, the objects I’m working on can be approached with technologies I hadn’t really thought of using before. In the traditional ‘lone-wolf’ world of the humanities, such collaborations with colleagues working in fields like physics and chemistry are hideously difficult to start. They require the collaborative setting that CSMC has been developing and is in the process of developing further.
The main challenge I see is – unsurprisingly – time. Collaborative work requires a lot of it because we have to explain our work outside our established academic bubbles and we have to understand work that has developed in academic conventions that are often alien to us. Here at CSMC, this takes place in a large number of fascinating research fields, working groups, and spontaneous initiatives, meaning that the potential collaborations actually go well beyond what is realistically possible.
Do you have a scientific role model?
Not really. Academic research is inherently a collaborative exercise and I’ve worked with many wonderful scholars (and a few less wonderful ones as well). Each of us has a fair amount of flaws, which should discourage anyone from picking a specific individual as a role model.
One of the scholars I highly esteem is the Syrian scholar Youssef Eche, who was born in 1911 in what was still the Ottoman Empire at that point. He lived through the French colonial period and was actively engaged in building up cultural institutions in the period of decolonialisation. Amongst other things, he was the director of the Syrian National Manuscript Library in Damascus, the founding director of the Institute of Arabic Manuscripts in Cairo, and a member of various UNESCO commissions. Despite his numerous administrative engagements, he can be considered the pioneer of historical library studies; his Les bibliothèques arabes publiques et semipubliques en Mésopotamie, en Syrie et en Égypte au Moyen Âge from 1967 is still a towering achievement. He developed an innovative methodology of using paratextual notes on manuscripts, but the importance of his approach was not really understood during his lifetime. He spent most of his life far from university, but his work was still miles ahead of what was produced in universities in Europe, the US, and the Middle East throughout the twentieth century. It took almost half a century before the field finally understood the importance of his approach.
Our rather thick book doesn’t even cover half the topics that this one list has presented us with.
Do you have a favourite written artefact? What is it and what makes it so special to you?
My favourite written artefacts are lists, or more specifically book lists, which seem to have a worryingly addictive quality to them.
My favourite list at the moment is – not surprisingly – the list in which the auction of Burhan al-Din’s estate is recorded. The scribe who wrote this auction list was highly professional and writing such lists was part of his daily job. Consequently, he wrote it at a very high pace and it’s rather bewildering at first glance. However, its documentary logic gradually emerges and one slowly discovers a highly intricate system for recording who bought what item(s) for what price at this auction. What I find particularly beautiful are the hundreds of numbers written in a shorthand system for which our field doesn’t even have a name and that are fiendishly difficult to read (for us today, at least).
What is even more intriguing is a system of strokes that were used and which again seemed rather random at first glance. We only understood the purpose of them after discovering other accounts that also belonged to Burhan al-Din’s estate settlement, in which scribes had recorded which buyers at the auction had paid their dues and which had not. After writing these accounts, the scribes returned to the auction list and indicated the buyers’ payments – which were often only partial – by using a series of strokes. In addition to these, there are holes and folding patterns on this list that tell us a great deal about archival practices in private homes and among judicial parties. They reveal who preserved such documents, where they were preserved and what for.
Apart from deciphering how such a list works and what different purposes it fulfilled in different stages of its life, the other fun bit is the content itself. One not only gets to see the books on the shelves (or in the bookcases) of such an average household, but also the other parts of its material world: pots, jars, knives, and plates from the kitchen; overgarments, knitwear, long robes, and headgear from Burhan al-Din’s wardrobe; combs, a comb box, a bathing bucket, and razors for his personal care; and cushions, carpets, fans, and candlesticks that had adorned his house. Lists of this kind contain all kinds of rabbit holes that lead to issues that are at the heart of human history. When we started to work on this particular list, we intended to write a medium-length article about it, but as so often happens, by the time we finished it, it had turned into a rather thick book that doesn’t even cover half the topics that the list has presented us with over the last few years.
Konrad Hirschler
joined the CSMC in October 2021. Besides being the new spokesperson for 'Archiving Artefacts', he is also a member of 'Creating Originals'.