Over the past decade the history of the book with subfields such as reading history have emerged as major subjects of research in North African and Southwest Asian history. The trend reflects wider reorientations in the field, including a stronger interest in the materiality of the objects we research, a distinctive opening to other disciplines and a focus on how different historical actors ascribed highly divergent meanings to texts. At the same time, the handwritten book has re-emerged as a central locus of research for mere practical reasons, namely easier (though not necessarily unproblematic) access to manuscripts as a result of the digitalisation of our scholarly practices.

This workshop is aimed at reflecting on this shift, its potential for writing the broader history of the regions and practical research strategies. After a broader introduction, we will look at one example, the potential of audition certificates, sama’at, in which a teacher grants the participants of a reading session the licence to teach (or rather transmit) the text read out. These audition certificates contain an unparalleled wealth of historical data for the medieval period that we do not find in narrative sources such as chronicles and biographical dictionaries. For instance, these notes contain the names of marginalised individuals, especially of women and slaves, who hardly appear as historical actors in narrative sources. In the same vein, we find here topographical information, names of buildings, links of kinship, prices, historical events, and terms for various crafts and trades. These notes thus constitute an archival repository of outstanding importance for a number of fields, such as social history, history of ideas, economic history, urban history, historical topography, and biographical studies. In this workshop, these manuscript notes will be used for thinking about the movement of the material objects in the course of their life cycle.

Konrad Hirschler is Professor of Middle Eastern History and director of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures at Universität Hamburg. He was previously Professor of Middle Eastern History at SOAS (London) and Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on Northern Africa and Southwest Asia between c. 1200 and 1500 with a focus on social and cultural history (history of reading, the book and libraries) with an emphasis on material culture. He is amongst others author of books such as A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture (2020), Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library (2016), The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands (2012) and Medieval Arabic Historiography (2006), co-author of Owning Books and Preserving Documents in Medieval Jerusalem (2023) and Muʾallafat Yūsuf b. Ḥasan Ibn ʿAbd al-Hādī (2021), as well as co-editor of The Library of Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar (2025), Catalogue of the New Corpus of Documents from al-Ḥaram al-Sharīf in Jerusalem (2024), The Damascus Fragments (2020) and Manuscript Notes as Documentary Sources (2011).

This study offers a preliminary examination of how Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscripts from the Ottoman Empire, Zand/Qajar Iran and Mughal India entered British collections via Baghdad in the 19th century. It focuses particularly on Claudius James Rich (1786–1821), a British diplomat fluent in local languages, who was both a scholar and an active traveler across the Ottoman Empire. As British Resident in Baghdad from 1816 to 1821, Rich amassed an extensive manuscript collection—389 in Arabic, 230 in Persian, and 110 in Turkish—which his widow donated to the British Library in May 1825.

Although briefly discussed in a 1963 British Museum Quarterly article, key questions about Rich’s manuscript acquisitions remain unanswered: the circumstances under which he obtained them, his scholarly engagement with the texts, and their role in his personal library have yet to be fully explored. This study addresses these issues by examining two manuscripts of the lesser-known Kalīla va Dimna—specifically, its Persian versified adaptation by Qāniʿī Ṭūsī, dedicated to the Seljuq ruler of Anatolia, ʿIzz al-Dīn Kay Kāʾūs II (r. 1246–62).

The analysis is structured as follows. First, it considers the low survival rate of Qāniʿī Ṭūsī’s Kalīla va Dimna and shows that Rich was initially drawn to the work because of its rarity, as attested by his correspondence. Second, it demonstrates that two of the four surviving manuscripts were once owned by Rich. Evidence suggests that he used one copy, dated 1459, as a model to commission another in 1817—likely intended as a commemorative gift marking the 1816 publication of an abridged edition of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s Arabic Kalīla wa Dimna in Paris by the French Orientalist Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838), a scholar he most admired.

Drawing on codicological analysis of these two manuscripts, along with relevant archival documents and unpublished correspondence between Rich and Silvestre de Sacy, this study offers new insights into the collection, patronage, and readership of Persian manuscripts facilitated by a British diplomat in 19th-century Baghdad. It specifically portrays Rich as an erudite collector of manuscripts, well integrated into the higher circles of European Orientalism at the time. The study also identifies avenues for further research, particularly into the provenance of Persian manuscripts acquired by British East India Company employees in the region, who obtained them from a wide range of sources.

Yui Kanda is an Assistant Professor at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and an Associate Member of the Centre for Iranian Studies at SOAS, University of London. Her research focuses on Islamic art from the early modern Persianate world, including ceramics, metalwork, and manuscripts, and involves examining primary sources in Persian and Arabic. She received her MPhil in Islamic Art and Archaeology from the University of Oxford in 2015 and her PhD in the History of Art from the University of Tokyo in 2021. Her ongoing research projects explore: 1) the pious endowments of Arabic and Persian manuscripts and artworks by Shāh ʿAbbās (r. 1588–1629) and the archival practices for these works in Iranian and Iraqi shrines, 2) the reception and circulation of Persian corpus of Kalīla va Dimna manuscripts in the Ottoman lands, 3) Chagatai and Persian manuscripts in Pakistani collections, and 4) the library of Claudius James Rich (d. 1821).