Konrad Hirschler
Biographic Data
| ID | 537258 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Konrad Hirschler |
| GIVEN NAMES | Konrad |
| FAMILY NAME | Hirschler |
| SIGNATURE | HIRSCHLER K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Universität Hamburg |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6012-7711 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 16 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Destroyed Books, Ransomed Books, Mobile Books: The Early Crusades and the Fate of Tripoli’s Library
This article explores the impact of the early Crusades on libraries in Greater Syria, with a particular focus on Tripoli's renowned House of Wisdom. After the city's Crusader conquest in 1109, this organisation's library disappears from historical sources. Modern scholarship has largely remained silent on this issue. However, popular modern accounts have filled this gap, suggesting the complete destruction of the library, especially the burning o…
Archival Practices and the Codex: A Mamlūk Protocol on Regulating Markets in Damascus and Its Ottoman Afterlife
This article explores the intersection of archival practices, material philology, and administrative documentation in late Mamlūk and early Ottoman Damascus through an in-depth analysis of the codex as a site for document preservation. Challenging earlier assumptions about the absence of archival institutions and documentation in pre-Ottoman West Asia and North Africa, the authors propose a tripartite framework – transmediation, translocation, an…
Building sustainable information systems and transformer models on demand
The growing practice of archiving research data in repositories reflects an upward trend. However, storing data in an RDR (Research Data Repository) does not guarantee that the archived data will always be readily reusable, even if this fulfils the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable Reusable) principles. To ensure sustainable RDM (Research Data Management), archiving must consider the future potential for data reuse in a low-threshold fash…
Exploring non-archival trajectories of written artefacts: An introduction
Historians are biased.They tend to be strongly pro-archive, as archives, according to standard assumptions, enable their work.Archival silence is perceived as an existential threat to historical memory, since historians reconstruct the past from corpora of sources that are ideally well contextualised and interconnected.Historians hope for organised, intentional, and (at least theoretically) accessible record-keeping; based on that belief, modern …
Lire les marges et analyser la matérialité: Le monde social des manuscrits arabes médiévaux
Invité par Nuria de Castilla, directrice d’études d’« Histoire et codicologie du livre manuscrit arabe », pour l’année 2022-2023, le professeur Konrad Hirschler (CSMC, université de Hambourg) a donné quatre conférences sur le thème « Lire les marges et analyser la matérialité : le monde social des manuscrits arabes médiévaux ».I. Approches des manuscrits arabes : de la philologie à la philologie matérielleCette conférence a initié les étudiants à…
A Glimpse into Egyptian/Syrian Elite Book Culture During the Seventh/Thirteenth Century: Booklist T-S Misc. 24.28 from the Cairo Geniza Corpus
This article discusses the fragment of an Arabic-script book list with a Cairo Geniza provenance that includes 33 identifiable titles. On the basis of the list’s provenance, its organization, and its content, we argue that it was part of a larger Cairene library catalogue dating to the seventh/thirteenth century. All titles in this catalogue refer to Arabic poetry ranging from pre-Islamic jāhilī ʾ poets to poets living in the first half of the se…
Saleroom Fiction versus Provenance: Historicizing Manuscripts via Their Marginal and Material Logic (Schøyen Fragments 1776)
This article examines a group of twelve fragments in different languages and different scripts previously held in the Schøyen collection in London and Oslo. After they first emerged on the market in 1993, these fragments received colourful hypothetical and/or fictional pseudo-provenances. However, a consideration of the material logic of these parchment fragments (including folding lines and sewing holes) as well as an examination of the Arabic m…
Die Rifāʿīya aus Damaskus: Eine Privatbibliothek im osmanischen Syrien und ihr kulturelles Umfeld. By Boris Liebrenz
Die Rifāʿīya aus Damaskus: Eine Privatbibliothek im osmanischen Syrien und ihr kulturelles Umfeld. By Boris Liebrenz. Islamic Manuscripts and Books, vol. 10. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Pp. xvi + 421, illus. $181, €140
From Archive to Archival Practices: Rethinking the Preservation of Mamluk Administrative Documents
This article proposes a new approach to the question of why so few Arabic documents have survived in their original archival context. Taking the Mamluk period as a case study it argues that the category "archive" itself needs to be reconfigured, away from the idea of fixed archival spaces, or even a Mamluk state archive, toward archival practices. These archival practices were spread across the Mamluk realm and involved numerous actors, which inc…
Der Kadi und seine Zeugen: Studie der mamlukischen Ḥaram-Dokumente aus Jerusalem, written by Christian Müller
Arabic-Islamic Views of the Latin West: Tracing the Emergence of Medieval Europe, by Daniel G. König
While we have a substantial body of scholarship on medieval European views of the Muslim-governed territories and Islam, the opposite perspective has been hardly analysed yet. This is partly down to a stance best embodied by Bernard Lewis’s oeuvre, which assumed that authors writing in Arabic (or other Islamicate languages) simply had no interest, or at best a negligible interest, in the northern shores of the Mediterranean. This paradigm has bee…
Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library: The Ashrafiya Library Catalogue
The first documented insight into the content and structure of a large-scale medieval Arabic library The written text was a pervasive feature of cultural practices in the medieval Middle East. At the heart of book circulation stood libraries that experienced a rapid expansion from the twelfth century onwards. While the existence of these libraries is well known, our knowledge of their content and structure has been very limited as hardly any medi…
Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library : Medieval Damascus
The Ashrafīya Catalogue: Translation and Title Identification
Chapter 4 provides an annotated translation of each entry in the Ashrafiya catalogue identifying the titles. Each translated entry provides brief information on the author (who is sometimes named in the catalogue), the modern edition (if existing), the book’s thematic field as well as further information that is occasionally provided (e.g. multiple copies, number of quires, illustrations, name of copyist).
Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library: The Ashrafiya Library Catalogue
The written text was a pervasive feature of cultural practices in the medieval Middle East. At the heart of book circulation stood libraries that experienced a rapid expansion from the twelfth century onwards. While the existence of these libraries is well known our knowledge of their content and structure has been very limited as hardly any medieval Arabic catalogues have been preserved. This book discusses the largest and earliest medieval libr…
Mariage et séparation à Damas au Moyen Age: Un corpus de 62 documents juridiques inédits entre 337/948 et 698/1299, by Jean-Michel Mouton, Dominique Sourdel & Janine Sourdel-Thomine
Mariage et séparation à Damas au Moyen Age : Un corpus de 62 documents juridiques inédits entre 337/948 et 698/1299, by Jean-Michel Mouton, Dominique Sourdel & Janine Sourdel-Thomine (Documents relatifs à l'histoire des croisades, 21), (Paris: Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 2013), 326 pp., ISBN 978-2-87754-296-8, â ¬40. (First paragraph) This volume makes available extraordinary documents on legal practices related to marriage for f…
Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts: The Hamdani Collection the Library of the Institute of Ismaili Studies By François de Blois
The Ismaili Institute in London is home to a unique collection of manuscripts mostly (though not exclusively) written by Ismaili authors. For any library holding manuscripts, cataloguing is a major challenge so that the material is accessible to wider audiences. The Ismaili Institute has invested considerable resources in cataloguing projects and this is the fifth volume to come out. The preceding four volumes (Gacek [1984, 1985] and Cortese [200…
Intensification and Reorientation of Sunni Jihad Ideology in the Crusader Period: Ibn ʿAsakir of Damascus (1105–1176) and His Age, with an Edition and Translation of Ibn ʿAsakir’s The Forty Hadiths fo…
The Intensification and Reorientation of Sunni Jihad Ideology in the Crusader Period: Ibn ʿAsākir of Damascus (1105–1176) and His Age, with an Edition and Translation of Ibn ʿAsākir’s The Forty Hadiths for Inciting Jihad. By Suleiman A. Mourad and James E. Lindsay. Islamic History and Civilization, vol. 99. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Pp. xv + 222. $133
Politics, Patronage and the Transmission of Knowledge in 13th-15th Century Tabriz, edited by Judith Pfeiffer
The Jerusalem Conquest of 492/1099 in the Medieval Arabic Historiography of the Crusades: From Regional Plurality to Islamic Narrative
This article discusses the reports on the conquest of Jerusalem in 492/1099 in Arabic chronicles. It argues that the reports on this event developed in three distinct and very diverse regional traditions in Egypt, Syria and Iraq. On the basis of the early Egyptian and Syrian evidence, it is highly unlikely that the conquest of Jerusalem was accompanied by a large-scale massacre of the entire population. This evidence shows furthermore that contem…
Studying Mamluk Historiography. From Source-Criticism to the Cultural Turn
Alliances and Treaties between Frankish and Muslim Rulers in the Middle East: Cross-Cultural Diplomacy in the Period of the Crusades. Translated by Peter M. Holt. Revised, edited and introduced by Kon…
Cover illustration: One of the few surviving artifacts linked to Muslim-Frankish relations in the Eastern Mediterranean. This basin with Arabic and French inscription was presumably produced in Egypt (or Syria) for Hugh IV of Lusignan (d. 1359), King of Cyprus and Jerusalem. The
Zeugnis und Zeugenschaft: Perspektiven aus der Vormoderne
Zeugnisse machen Erfahrungswerte für Mitglieder einer Gesellschaft verfügbar, die nicht an der Erfahrungssituation selbst beteiligt sind oder waren. Innerhalb der kulturellen Profilierung von Gesellschaften steuern sie die Prozesse der Manifestation und Tradierung und haben so einen entscheidenden Anteil an Historiographie, Memoria und Wissenstransfer. Der interdisziplinär angelegte Band vereinigt Perspektiven aus Historiographie, Kunst, Literatu…
The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands: A Social and Cultural History of Reading Practices
Winner of the 2012 BRISMES book prizeHow the written text became accessible to wider audiences in medieval Egypt and SyriaMedieval Islamic societies belonged to the most bookish cultures of their period. Using a wide variety of documentary, narrative and normative sources, Konrad Hirschler explores the growth of reading audiences in a pre-print culture.The uses of the written word grew significantly in Egypt and Syria between the 11th and the 15t…
Manuscript notes as documentary sources
Defining the Nation: Kurdish Historiography in Turkey in the 1990s
This article examines Kurdish historiography in Turkey in the 1990s. It centres on the question how the national community is historicised via central myths, especially for the pre-Islamic periods. As a source basis writings of members of the intellectual elite which are published in newspapers are used. This article argues that identity in the Kurdish society is currently mainly constructed around an ethnic history, which assumes Kurdishness to …
From Archive to Archival Practices: Rethinking the Preservation of Mamluk Administrative Documents
This article proposes a new approach to the question of why so few Arabic documents have survived in their original archival context. Taking the Mamluk period as a case study it argues that the category "archive" itself needs to be reconfigured, away from the idea of fixed archival spaces, or even a Mamluk state archive, toward archival practices. These archival practices were spread across the Mamluk realm and involved numerous actors, which inc…
Pre-Eighteenth-Century Traditions of Revivalism: Damascus in the Thirteenth Century
this article examines whether it is possible to trace eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revivalist thought to earlier 'medieval' examples. the discussion is centred on the issue of ijtiha ̄d/taqli ̄d, which featured prominently in revivalist thought. taking the example of scholars in thirteenth-century damascus, it firstly compares the respective readings of ijtiha ̄d/taqli ̄d, by focusing on one individual, abu ̄ sha ̄ma (d. 1267). it secondly …
The "Pharaoh" Anecdote in Pre-Modern Arabic Historiography
This article examines the development of the pharaoh as a literary figure in Arabic historiography between the third/ninth and the ninth/fifteenth centuries. The first aim is to reflect upon the changing narrative structure of such anecdotes in texts ranging from the universal chronicle of al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923) to the regional chronicle of al-Maqrīzī (d. 845/1442). The article’s second concern is to evaluate the plurality of meanings that emerge…
"Catching the Eel" - Documentary Evidence for Concepts of the Arabic Book in the Middle Period
This article reflects on the concept of the ‘book’ in the Middle Period(fifth/eleventh to early tenth/sixteenth centuries). On the basis of a seventh/thirteenth-century library catalogue from Damascus it discusseshow contemporaries faced the challenge of defining what a book actuallywas. Focusing on the catalogue’s section on composite manuscripts(majāmīʿ) it suggests that this document’s writer employed two—ultimately irreconcilable—definitions …
Defining the Nation: Kurdish Historiography in Turkey in the 1990s
This article examines Kurdish historiography in Turkey in the 1990s. It centres on the question how the national community is historicised via central myths, especially for the pre-Islamic periods. As a source basis writings of members of the intellectual elite which are published in newspapers are used. This article argues that identity in the Kurdish society is currently mainly constructed around an ethnic history, which assumes Kurdishness to …
Pre-Eighteenth-Century Traditions of Revivalism: Damascus in the Thirteenth Century
this article examines whether it is possible to trace eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revivalist thought to earlier 'medieval' examples. the discussion is centred on the issue of ijtiha ̄d/taqli ̄d, which featured prominently in revivalist thought. taking the example of scholars in thirteenth-century damascus, it firstly compares the respective readings of ijtiha ̄d/taqli ̄d, by focusing on one individual, abu ̄ sha ̄ma (d. 1267). it secondly …
Medieval Arabic Historiography: Authors as Actors
A study of post-classical Arabic historiography, focusing on two major Crusader-period chronicles written in Syria and Egypt. It investigates the authors’ room to manoeuvre – ‘agency’ – in composing their works by considering the interplay between social context, intellectual tradition and narrative structure. The book contributes to the vivid debate on Islamic historiography and aims at bridging the conceptual gap that separates this debate from…
Zeugnis und Zeugenschaft: Perspektiven aus der Vormoderne
Zeugnisse machen Erfahrungswerte für Mitglieder einer Gesellschaft verfügbar, die nicht an der Erfahrungssituation selbst beteiligt sind oder waren. Innerhalb der kulturellen Profilierung von Gesellschaften steuern sie die Prozesse der Manifestation und Tradierung und haben so einen entscheidenden Anteil an Historiographie, Memoria und Wissenstransfer. Der interdisziplinär angelegte Band vereinigt Perspektiven aus Historiographie, Kunst, Literatu…
The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands: A Social and Cultural History of Reading Practices
Winner of the 2012 BRISMES book prizeHow the written text became accessible to wider audiences in medieval Egypt and SyriaMedieval Islamic societies belonged to the most bookish cultures of their period. Using a wide variety of documentary, narrative and normative sources, Konrad Hirschler explores the growth of reading audiences in a pre-print culture.The uses of the written word grew significantly in Egypt and Syria between the 11th and the 15t…
Manuscript notes as documentary sources
Studying Mamluk Historiography. From Source-Criticism to the Cultural Turn
Alliances and Treaties between Frankish and Muslim Rulers in the Middle East: Cross-Cultural Diplomacy in the Period of the Crusades. Translated by Peter M. Holt. Revised, edited and introduced by Kon…
Cover illustration: One of the few surviving artifacts linked to Muslim-Frankish relations in the Eastern Mediterranean. This basin with Arabic and French inscription was presumably produced in Egypt (or Syria) for Hugh IV of Lusignan (d. 1359), King of Cyprus and Jerusalem. The
Politics, Patronage and the Transmission of Knowledge in 13th-15th Century Tabriz, edited by Judith Pfeiffer
The Jerusalem Conquest of 492/1099 in the Medieval Arabic Historiography of the Crusades: From Regional Plurality to Islamic Narrative
This article discusses the reports on the conquest of Jerusalem in 492/1099 in Arabic chronicles. It argues that the reports on this event developed in three distinct and very diverse regional traditions in Egypt, Syria and Iraq. On the basis of the early Egyptian and Syrian evidence, it is highly unlikely that the conquest of Jerusalem was accompanied by a large-scale massacre of the entire population. This evidence shows furthermore that contem…
Mariage et séparation à Damas au Moyen Age: Un corpus de 62 documents juridiques inédits entre 337/948 et 698/1299, by Jean-Michel Mouton, Dominique Sourdel & Janine Sourdel-Thomine
Mariage et séparation à Damas au Moyen Age : Un corpus de 62 documents juridiques inédits entre 337/948 et 698/1299, by Jean-Michel Mouton, Dominique Sourdel & Janine Sourdel-Thomine (Documents relatifs à l'histoire des croisades, 21), (Paris: Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 2013), 326 pp., ISBN 978-2-87754-296-8, â ¬40. (First paragraph) This volume makes available extraordinary documents on legal practices related to marriage for f…
Arabic, Persian and Gujarati Manuscripts: The Hamdani Collection the Library of the Institute of Ismaili Studies By François de Blois
The Ismaili Institute in London is home to a unique collection of manuscripts mostly (though not exclusively) written by Ismaili authors. For any library holding manuscripts, cataloguing is a major challenge so that the material is accessible to wider audiences. The Ismaili Institute has invested considerable resources in cataloguing projects and this is the fifth volume to come out. The preceding four volumes (Gacek [1984, 1985] and Cortese [200…
Intensification and Reorientation of Sunni Jihad Ideology in the Crusader Period: Ibn ʿAsakir of Damascus (1105–1176) and His Age, with an Edition and Translation of Ibn ʿAsakir’s The Forty Hadiths fo…
The Intensification and Reorientation of Sunni Jihad Ideology in the Crusader Period: Ibn ʿAsākir of Damascus (1105–1176) and His Age, with an Edition and Translation of Ibn ʿAsākir’s The Forty Hadiths for Inciting Jihad. By Suleiman A. Mourad and James E. Lindsay. Islamic History and Civilization, vol. 99. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Pp. xv + 222. $133
Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library: The Ashrafiya Library Catalogue
The first documented insight into the content and structure of a large-scale medieval Arabic library The written text was a pervasive feature of cultural practices in the medieval Middle East. At the heart of book circulation stood libraries that experienced a rapid expansion from the twelfth century onwards. While the existence of these libraries is well known, our knowledge of their content and structure has been very limited as hardly any medi…
Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library : Medieval Damascus
The Ashrafīya Catalogue: Translation and Title Identification
Chapter 4 provides an annotated translation of each entry in the Ashrafiya catalogue identifying the titles. Each translated entry provides brief information on the author (who is sometimes named in the catalogue), the modern edition (if existing), the book’s thematic field as well as further information that is occasionally provided (e.g. multiple copies, number of quires, illustrations, name of copyist).
Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library: The Ashrafiya Library Catalogue
The written text was a pervasive feature of cultural practices in the medieval Middle East. At the heart of book circulation stood libraries that experienced a rapid expansion from the twelfth century onwards. While the existence of these libraries is well known our knowledge of their content and structure has been very limited as hardly any medieval Arabic catalogues have been preserved. This book discusses the largest and earliest medieval libr…
Arabic-Islamic Views of the Latin West: Tracing the Emergence of Medieval Europe, by Daniel G. König
While we have a substantial body of scholarship on medieval European views of the Muslim-governed territories and Islam, the opposite perspective has been hardly analysed yet. This is partly down to a stance best embodied by Bernard Lewis’s oeuvre, which assumed that authors writing in Arabic (or other Islamicate languages) simply had no interest, or at best a negligible interest, in the northern shores of the Mediterranean. This paradigm has bee…
Der Kadi und seine Zeugen: Studie der mamlukischen Ḥaram-Dokumente aus Jerusalem, written by Christian Müller
Die Rifāʿīya aus Damaskus: Eine Privatbibliothek im osmanischen Syrien und ihr kulturelles Umfeld. By Boris Liebrenz
Die Rifāʿīya aus Damaskus: Eine Privatbibliothek im osmanischen Syrien und ihr kulturelles Umfeld. By Boris Liebrenz. Islamic Manuscripts and Books, vol. 10. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Pp. xvi + 421, illus. $181, €140
From Archive to Archival Practices: Rethinking the Preservation of Mamluk Administrative Documents
This article proposes a new approach to the question of why so few Arabic documents have survived in their original archival context. Taking the Mamluk period as a case study it argues that the category "archive" itself needs to be reconfigured, away from the idea of fixed archival spaces, or even a Mamluk state archive, toward archival practices. These archival practices were spread across the Mamluk realm and involved numerous actors, which inc…
Saleroom Fiction versus Provenance: Historicizing Manuscripts via Their Marginal and Material Logic (Schøyen Fragments 1776)
This article examines a group of twelve fragments in different languages and different scripts previously held in the Schøyen collection in London and Oslo. After they first emerged on the market in 1993, these fragments received colourful hypothetical and/or fictional pseudo-provenances. However, a consideration of the material logic of these parchment fragments (including folding lines and sewing holes) as well as an examination of the Arabic m…
A Glimpse into Egyptian/Syrian Elite Book Culture During the Seventh/Thirteenth Century: Booklist T-S Misc. 24.28 from the Cairo Geniza Corpus
This article discusses the fragment of an Arabic-script book list with a Cairo Geniza provenance that includes 33 identifiable titles. On the basis of the list’s provenance, its organization, and its content, we argue that it was part of a larger Cairene library catalogue dating to the seventh/thirteenth century. All titles in this catalogue refer to Arabic poetry ranging from pre-Islamic jāhilī ʾ poets to poets living in the first half of the se…
History (21 works) · Art (18 works) · Historical and Linguistic Studies (16 works) · Archaeology and Historical Studies (15 works) · Islamic Studies and History (14 works) · Political science (13 works) · Archaeology (12 works) · Classics (12 works) · Literature (12 works) · Philosophy (12 works)