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.
Konrad Hirschler
joined the CSMC in October 2021. Besides being the new spokesperson for 'Archiving Artefacts', he is also a member of 'Creating Originals'.