Manuscripts are the most important media in the history of writing. Manuscripts determined the history of Arabic literary production, transmission, and reception until the early modern era and, occasionally, down to the present day.
Manuscripts, too, are the central media on which the research of “Bibliotheca Arabica – Towards a New History of Arabic Literature” is based. “Bibliotheca Arabica” is a research project within the German Academies’ Programme, and it is housed at the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig. The project started in 2018 and runs until 2035. With its research and digital resources, it develops and compiles fundamental knowledge about the history of Arabic literatures – belles-lettres, religious and scientific works, and other written materials – between 1150 and 1850 CE.
Spanning seven centuries, this period of Arabic cultural history has long been recognised as a steady decline following the end of the so-called Golden Age of Arabic-Islamic literature up to the Abbasid period. This culturalist narrative was based on the assumption (together with its associated terminology) that there had been a “rise”, a “classical flourishing”, followed by a “post-classical decline”, and finally a “renaissance” in the period of the Nahda (al-nahḍa), the cultural upsurge in the Middle East in the nineteenth century, that was supposedly inspired by the encounter with the West.
As a result, even in Arabic studies there was – until well into the twentieth century, and even afterwards – little interest in the literature of this long period. This resulted in a severe neglect of manuscript and early print sources in terms of their indexing, research, and interpretation.
In order to challenge this encompassing narrative, a revision of Arabic literary historiography is required. After initial attempts that began in the late twentieth century, research in Arabic studies is now broadly concerned with discovering and exploring literatures and literary cultures in this so-called “dark age”. Thus, Arabic studies is currently in a highly dynamic phase: the role of literature and its place and evolution in living environments, especially in the middle Islamic (c.1100–1500) and early modern periods, has been and continues to be the subject of a growing number of research projects in Arabic and Islamic studies, among them “Bibliotheca Arabica”.
Conceptually, “Bibliotheca Arabica” draws on the perspectives and methods of the history of transmission, first developed in medieval European literary and manuscript studies, and it proposes an approach in form of a historical literary history (Kurt Ruh) and the closely related field of material philology. From the point of view of these approaches, a text, a literary work, or a genre, is not regarded as fixed, but as variable, dynamically changing and evolving in a historical space of transmission. In contrast to a purely chronologically arranged literary history, in which literary works are ordered and considered according to the time of their creation, “Bibliotheca Arabica” seeks, through the evidence that manuscripts provide, to capture the circulation and reception – or equally the loss of circulation – in the centuries after their creation.
In the “Bibliotheca Arabica” project, Arabic literature is studied from two main perspectives. On the one hand, selected genres, text groups, or texts are researched in terms of their production, transmission, and reception over long periods of time and great distances, and under changing political, social, and cultural conditions. This also includes the question of textual practices for the use, or study, of texts. While nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century philology stressed the “originality” of self-standing authorial works, “Bibliotheca Arabica” shifts the focus to include the many adaptations and exegetical works, such as commentaries, abridgements, rewritings and variant versions, as well as translations – all texts once considered to represent the narrative of decline. While selected works and genres are at the forefront here, a second perspective clearly opens up towards the agents – as copyists, collectors, vendors, donors, and readers in their respective local contexts. Through the analysis of paratexts such as owners’, readers’, or endowment notes, the long journeys of books, the circulation of texts, the genesis of libraries, and the profile of collectors can be reconstructed, thus illustrating the place in life (Sitz im Leben) of Arabic literatures. Even though these two perspectives show different thematic priorities, they do intersect in many respects.
Central to this research programme is the creation of a digital research platform. The graph database, named “Khizana” (book treasury), links information on the production, transmission, and reception of works of Arabic literature. “Khizana” is a platform that integrates diverse data on manuscript-related entities, including individuals in various roles, works, and manuscript notes. Each entry is interconnected, standardised, and consistently supported by source references, making Khizana a valuable tool for exploring the history of Arabic literatures from multiple perspectives. It consequently does not only serve the study of the history of Arabic literatures and manuscripts within Arabic and Islamic studies, but also represents a useful tool for all disciplines devoted to the multifarious and multilingual communities connected through the literary heritage in the Arabic language – as, for instance, African studies, Jewish studies, Indology, Iranian studies, Coptic studies, Ottoman studies, and Central Asian studies.
The Book Series “Bibliotheca Arabica”
In order to showcase its research results, “Bibliotheca Arabica” now opens its own book series, published in print as well as in gold open access with the publishers De Gruyter Brill. This and all the following volumes are immediately available on the publisher’s website and can be accessed free of charge from the date of their publication. This book series includes monographic studies, as well as methodologically oriented edited volumes. Moreover, we are pleased to publish selected studies in our series that are based on the PhD dissertations of our doctoral fellows. An editorial board of renowned experts has been established for the “Bibliotheca Arabica” book series from volume 2 onwards. It is already listed on Brill’s “Bibliotheca Arabica” series website at https://brill.edhh.ma/biba.
The Present Volume
The volume Marginal Matters: Explorations into Commenting and Glossing Techniques in Arabic Manuscript Cultures has arisen from the thematic module of commentary literature (2018–2024), designed and organised by the research fellow Dr. Stefanie Brinkmann. The volume has been developed following two international workshops (2018 and 2019) on textual practices of marginal commentaries, or commentary glosses, in manuscripts across different regions of the wide-ranging and yet intimately intertwined Islamicate world. The main focus of the workshops was on comparing such practices among manuscripts relating to disciplines focusing on different areas of study, such as history, science, religion, and so on. The volume furthermore illustrates the many challenges of studying these paratextual features, and it shows the potential that analysing these texts has for answering broader questions about the transmission of texts, works, and genres, as well as the ways in which they were studied.
Unlike in other academic disciplines such as medieval or classical philology, there has not yet been any systematic research conducted on the practice of commentarial annotations in Arabic manuscripts. This present volume is a first step to fill this lacuna, and will hopefully stimulate further research.
Verena Klemm