Paul Babinski

Ms. 3406, Süleyman Efendi’s endowment deed on folio 1r. Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, ms. 3406 © 2023 by AMS Historica is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Rawda El-Hajji visiting the Church of Our Lady of Buda Castle, Budapest. © Ashraf Sarip

Once a hub of Ottoman culture, Süleyman Efendi’s library was scattered by conquest. In our PhD Research Series, Rawda El-Hajji traces these manuscripts, showing how they help reconstruct lost intellectual communities and reveal the fate of cultural heritage in times of conflict:
uhh.de/csmc-el-hajji

The Royal Danish Library: A Case Study in the History of European Islamic Manuscript Collections Paul Babinski examines the provenance of Islamic manuscripts held in the Royal Library in Copenhagen, tracing the genesis of the collection and its historical contexts from the library’s founding in t...

Here’s the link for the talk, “The Royal Danish Library: A Case Study in the History of European Islamic Manuscript Collections”, 25 April, 12:00 PM EDT: www.library.upenn.edu/events/royal...

For instance, one our more exciting discoveries in Copenhagen: this 1633 printing in Arabic of the Poem on the Soul attributed to Ibn Sīnā, which was bound into the Dutch orientalist Jacob Golius’s interleaved & annotated copy of his Proverbia quaedam Alis. CKB, ms Or.Arch. 1-8

This Friday I'll give a talk online (for UPenn's Schoenberg Institute) on the collection of Islamic manuscripts at the Royal Library in Copenhagen. Please come (link below)! I’ll be highlighting some of the new finds made by the Copenhagen team of the EuQu project.

Early modern manicule left by an orientalist in a Bologna copy of Saʿdī’s Gulistān. It points to an Ottoman marginal note with the fifteenth-century Turkish translation (by Manyaslı Mahmud) of a passage in the Persian text. Bologna University Library, ms 3280.

That sounds promising. Thank you!

Collecting Islamic Manuscripts in Early Modern Europe: The Marsili Collection in Context First meeting of the seminar series ‘At the Intersection of Multiple Memories. Collecting Manuscripts in Early Modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire: The Marsili Case’.

If you’re around, please join! Also, food recommendations for Bologna or Milan are especially welcome. centri.unibo.it/memorylab/en...

I’m very excited to be speaking on March 11 at the University of Bologna on the history of collecting Islamic manuscripts in Europe, for the series “At the Intersection of Multiple Memories. Collecting Manuscripts in Early Modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire: The Marsili Case”

Olearius’s notebook is today (with a number of other Olearius manuscripts) in the Berlin State Library and was recently digitized: resolver.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/SBB0002F6C50...

“Come to our house without ceremony / For what ceremony is there between you and us” - Persian verse written by Muḥibb ʿAlī, the teacher of a seventeenth-century German traveler in Shamakhi, Adam Olearius (1599-1671), in the notebook Olearius used for studying Persian. SBB-PK, ms or. oct. 3

The three languages of Ottoman learning: notes on Turkish grammar (with the conjugation of "sevmek", to love) recorded by the English orientalist John Greaves (1602-1652) on the flyleaf of a Persian-language grammar of Arabic, also annotated by Greaves. Bodleian, ms Pococke 28.

Robyn's done incredible work on the subject and has managed to track down a bunch of these Istanbul albums. Fascinating manuscript. Thanks for sharing!

A fascinating meeting of two manuscript cultures. The Newberry manuscript uses Ottoman silhouetted paper (with columns for the two hemistichs of Ottoman poetry), turned 90° to record Latin/French sayings. For reference: a collection of Turkish poetry (KB-Copenhagen, ms Cod. Turc. 21)

@robyndoraradway.bsky.social

I think this misrepresents Marchand's criticism of Said, and I certainly wouldn't call her account of nineteenth-century oriental studies de-politicized.

This isn't necessarily bad. It can be a transformative experience to read Kafka with an expert teacher and reader. That person doesn't need to be much of a researcher. But it's pseudo-scientific to not distinguish that from, say, the work of identifying and editing Kafka's manuscripts.

Well, not frowned on if we're using the "everything professors write and think" standard. Some subfields (medieval, early modern) can be more research heavy, but that's not where the hiring is these days. "Research is what you do with your friends in your free time" one senior scholar told me.

In lit fields, research is generally frowned upon (how many get a TT job on the basis of a great edition?). But the vocabulary of "research" sounds good when you're asking for extra funding, sabbatical, etc.

Yes, though I don't think all (or even most) humanities work is research. There are real deficiencies in US humanities research, but that's in no small part due to the priorities of professors, hiring committees, admin.

I don't know, I think using the word "research" to mean "everything university professors in the humanities think and write" is pseudo-scientific and fetishizing, and obscures clear analysis of the research question (I mean, do libraries and museums play any role in this story??)

Not a big fan of Newfield's writing and find him unnecessarily jargony ("epistemic justice") and unclear (what is humanities research mean here, exactly?), but he's definitely right that the academic omerta is counterproductive.

Of course it's not unreasonable, and it's wrong to imagine Muslim classmates acquire knowledge of historical fact by some kind of osmosis. I just mean to say those complaining are glimpsing the profundity of their ignorance and the absence of the ambient awareness they benefit from in other areas.

I think there's a bit of truth in this, in that many are starting from absolute zero with the Near East/Islamic history, having none of the ambient accumulation of basic facts that might be there with, say, the US or Western Europe. A very real failure of primary and secondary school education.

Out now in OA: a volume celebrating (i.a.) the centenary of the East Asia Department at Berlin State Library! 🎉🥳 > doi.org/10.48796/202...

Incl. sth by Martina Siebert & myself on Sinica in Berlin in the 1680s, also two short pieces on contemporary "Chinese alphabets" and Lord's Prayer collections.

Damsels in Distress, Showing Up

Is there any study in particular that you think exemplifies the film library's new approach?

So it played an important role in shifting the focus of (what I'm guessing had largely been Germanophone) scholarship on East German film onto race, sexuality, and gender? Interesting. Thanks! I live nearby but don't really have any perspective on the DEFA Film Library.

What do you think that impact has been, specifically? Asking out of curiosity (and a general interest in how scholarship makes a difference).

Finally, there's the Casaubon copy of Juan Gabriel of Teruel's 1518 translation (which I just tweeted about on the other site), Cambridge UL, ms Mm.5.26. I don't think it's been digitized yet, but see Katarzyna Starczewska's study.

A great example of the early seventeenth-century study of Marc of Toledo's translation is BnF, ms Latin 3394. I've identified the annotator as Jean-Baptiste Du Val, & the notes are of general interest as they show someone studying the Arabic through Marc. archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/c...