Gotha Manuscript Talks, Spring 2023Between Preserving and Selling Literary Heritage

28 February 2023

Photo: Universität Erfurt

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Syrian Catholic priest Paul Sbath obtained and consolidated a collection of 1,325 Eastern Christian Arabic manuscripts that he partly sold to the Vatican Library in 1927.

From the late 19th century, private scholars took on vital role in the preservation and transfer of manuscripts and manuscript collections from the Middle East, West Asia, and North Africa to Europe and America. The spring series of the Gotha Manuscript Talks explores their backgrounds and motives.

For a long time, European collections and institutions obtained Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman manuscripts mainly from missionaries, merchants, and travellers. Starting in the late 19th century, however, a group of local manuscript collectors and sellers entered the scene, who mediated the transfer of large collections of manuscripts to libraries in Europe, America, and other parts of the world. Guardians and sellers of the literary heritage, these individuals functioned as intermediaries, as “brokers” who preserved and marketed manuscripts. Some of them were bibliophiles and worked towards creating their own collections, for their love of books or various scientific purposes. They kept meticulous records of their collections, produced and published indexes, and at a later stage negotiated the sale of these collections, sometimes under conditions of warfare and sectarian unrest.

To this date, this group of remains largely unstudied. The spring series of the Gotha Manuscript Talks 2023 focuses on local manuscript brokers, dealers in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman manuscripts, who around the turn of the 20th century played a crucial role in the preservation and transfer of manuscripts and manuscript collections from the Middle East, Turkey, West Asia and North Africa to Europe, America, and other locations. Speakers engage with the social and intellectual background of these bibliophiles and book dealers and their motivations for buying, preserving, and bartering books. They furthermore investigate the intellectual geography in which books circulated to be eventually assimilated in today’s oriental collections in libraries from Saint Petersburg to Rome and New Haven.

The Gotha Manuscript Talks are organised by the Gotha Research Library in cooperation with Konrad Hirschler at CSMC. It is the succesor of the series ‘Thinking Manuscript Provenance Beyond Europe’ (fall 2022) and ‘Scattered, Looted, Vandalized, and Destroyed: Manuscripts and Violence’ (spring 2022). Starting on 8 March, all lectures will be held on Wednesday evenings at 6:15 pm.