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Informationen zum Autor Konrad Hirschler is Professor of Middle Eastern History at Universität Hamburg (Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures) and previously held professorships of Middle Eastern History at SOAS (University of London) and Freie Universität Berlin. He is amongst others author of award-winning books such as A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture - The Library of Ibn ?Abd al-Hadi (EUP, 2020), Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library (EUP, 2016), The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands: A Social and Cultural History of Reading Practices (EUP, 2012) and Medieval Arabic Historiography: Authors as Actors (Routledge, 2006). Klappentext Author Approved Discusses how the written text became accessible to wider audiences in medieval Egypt and Syria. Medieval Islamic societies belonged to the most bookish cultures of their period. Yet the chronological development of how and when different sections of the population started to use the written word remains understudied. This book argues that the uses of the written word significantly expanded in Egypt and Syria between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries CE. This process of textualisation went hand in hand with a closely linked second process, popularisation, as wider groups within society started to participate in individual and communal reading acts. New audiences in reading sessions, changed curricula in children's schools, increasing numbers of endowed libraries and the appearance of popular literature in written form all bear witness to the profound transformation of cultural practices and their social contexts. Using a wide variety of documentary, narrative and normative sources, the book explores the growth of reading audiences in a pre-print culture. Konrad Hirschler is Senior Lecturer in the History of the Near and Middle East at SOAS, University of London. He is the author of /Medieval Arabic Historiography: Authors as Actors/ (2006) and co-editor of /Manuscript Notes as Documentary Sources/ (2011). [Konrad Hirschler's] book is a model of meticulous scholarship and should be in the library of all readers interested in the premodern cultural history of the Arabo-Islamic world.--Roger Allen "American Historical Review " ...
