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In recent years, a growing interest in "oriental manuscripts" in all their aspects, including the extrinsic ones, has been observed. Research that focuses on holograph, autograph and authorial manuscripts in Arabic handwritten script has nevertheless been casual, although these manuscripts raise important and varied questions. The study of the working methods of authors from the past informs different disciplines: paleography, codicology, textual criticism, ecdotics, linguistics and intellectual history. In this volume nine contributions and case studies are gathered that address theoretical issues and convey different, disruptive perspectives. A particularly important subject of this book, so far rarely discussed in scientific literature, is the identification of an author's handwriting. Among the authors specifically dealt with in this volume one will find: al-Maqrīzī (m. 845/1442), al-Nuwayrī (m. 733/1333), Akmal al-Dīn b. Mufliḥ (m. 1011/1603), al-ʿAynī (m. 855/1451) and Ibn Khaldūn (m. 808/1406). Contributors: Frédéric Bauden, Julien Dufour, Élise Franssen, Adam Gacek, Retsu Hashizume, Marie-Hélène Marganne, Elias Muhanna, Nobutaka Nakamachi, Anne Regourd, and Kristina Richardson.
About the author
Frédéric Bauden, Ph.D. (1996), Université de Liège, is Professor of Arabic Language and Islamic Studies at that university. He has published extensively on the history, historiography and diplomatics of the Mamluk period. He is the editor of the book series
Bibliotheca Maqriziana. Élise Franssen, Ph.D. (2012), Università Ca' Foscari, Venice, is a Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellow (2018-21). A specialist of codicology, she is currently working on the holograph volume of al-Ṣafadī's
Tadhkira and on her book on the manuscripts of the ZER recension of the
Thousand and One Nights.
