This is a collection of lessons in codicology – the study of handwritten documents or codices - and palaeography from the Muslim world. The lessons will guide you through the ways books were made and used there before the printing press, by investigating the traces left by producers, owners and readers of manuscripts. Using your mouse, you will come close to people in the manuscript age as they produced, transmitted, cherished and “consumed” the written texts.
The lessons are centered around fully digitalised manuscripts from the oriental collection of Leiden University Libraries. They include samples in Arabic, Persian and Coptic, from cultures ranging from the Maghrib to Mughal India. The lessons can be read in any order. All include suggestions for further reading and questions (with answers) or assignments.
Lesson 11 In the first centuries of Islam, the transmission of knowledge was predominantly oral. Kno...
Lesson 25 This lesson explores the twilight of Arabic manuscript production in the early twentieth c...
Lesson 15 Notes of ownership or tamalluk, often on the flyleaf of a codex, show us in the first plac...