Arabic Scribal and Documentary Cultures

This working group meets bi-weekly, drawing on the rich repository of Arabic material culture in the Near and Middle Eastern Books and Manuscripts and the Yale Papyri Collections to bring together scholars with interests in the fields of Late Antiquity and Medieval Studies, Arabic and Islamic Studies, Manuscript Studies, Art History, and Digital Humanities. While primarily focused on Arabic paleography, each session centers on a distinct codicological, scribal, or visual feature of Arabic manuscripts, including but not limited to colophons (kulūfūnāt), margins (ḥawāshī), endowment certificates (waqfiyyāt), student notes (muṭālaʿāt), ownership statements (tamallukāt), and book bindings (tajlīdāt). The purpose of the group is for participants to interrogate and gain greater familiarity with the logics and logistics of the Arabic manuscript tradition and to understand the circulation of manuscripts and documents not merely as texts but as material objects that generated meanings within social networks spanning across time, space, and social class. What does the writing material of a manuscript tell us about its circulation? How can we think about and conceptualize the semiotic relationship between a manuscript’s core text and marginal notes? In what cultural and religious terms did writers and scribes articulate their conceptions of Arabic manuscripts and documents? And can we use biological analogies such as the life cycle to understand the production, circulation, and deaccessioning of Arabic manuscripts and documents? The group will convene at the Beinecke Library. Knowledge of elementary Arabic is desired but not required. Participants are encouraged to communicate their research interests to the organizer for us to study a wide array of manuscripts from the Arabic legal, grammatical, scientific, epistolary, exegetical, and other traditions.