Fabrica linguae Arabicae, a 1639 Arabic-Italian-Latin dictionary by Dominicus Germanus de Silesia, notable for the woodcut calligraphy of its title page and its tree of Arabic verb forms. This copy was owned by the German orientalist Siegmund Fraenkel (1855-1909)

Not exactly news (since the semester began in August), but I’m very happy to have started a position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at the University of Georgia.

A pleasant surprise at the Hargrett Library at the University of Georgia: Mark Pattison’s copy of the 1629 edition of Scaliger’s De emendatione temporum, with a few annotations and a lovely nineteenth-century manicule

1656 edition of Thomas Erpenius’s Grammatica Arabica, with the annotations of a seventeenth-century student of Arabic, recording what appears to be instruction from Erpenius’s student (and the editor of this edition), Jacob Golius (1596-1667).

If there's anything more exciting than seeing a book you work on in an exhibition, it's surely being invited to talk about it. Very excited for this event next month! 📷 Lancelot Browne's annotated copy of Avicenna in Arabic at the @rcpmuseum.bsky.social exhibition, 'A body of knowledge'.

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

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.

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”

“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.

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)

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.

“To give an account of one’s reading is in some sort to give an account of one’s life”: A recent discovery for me, William Dean Howells’s 1895 My Literary Passions, a portrait of Howells as a young Ohio reader, told through the authors who were the stations of his literary education.

I'm giving a talk tomorrow (10 EST/4 CET) on "The Orientalist Librarian in Early Modern Europe". Please join! I'll discuss the role of the librarian in scholarship, Islamic manuscripts, and the history of collections-focused research.

What's a more poetic way of saying "worth its weight in gold"? This note on @bodleianlibraries.bsky.social MS. Pococke 294 is a pretty good candidate: "If this book were sold for its weight in gold, the seller would be the one cheated." #manuscripts #Arabic #عربي www.fihrist.org.uk/catalog/manu...

“Do good and throw it in the sea. If the fish (balık) don’t notice, God (Ḫāliḳ) will”. Turkish proverb with an engraving of a view of the Bosphorus and Istanbul, from Joseph Hammer’s 1819 Morgenländisches Kleeblatt

The Cambridge orientalist Abraham Wheelock, annotating a passage (in al-Makīn’s Arabic history) on monks in Egypt paying tribute to the Umayyad governor, cites Luke 20:25 (“Render unto Caesar…”) & remarks he willingly paid when Charles I taxed the clergy in 1635. CUL, Adv.a.48.2

Please share: Call for Applications Winter School: Reading and Analysing Ottoman Manuscript Sources March 17-25, 2025, Rethymno (Greece), IMS/FORTH www.ims.forth.gr/en/news-item...

Joachim Heinrich Campe’s Robinson der Jüngere, translated into Ottoman Turkish by a nineteenth-century student at Vienna’s Oriental Academy, with corrections. HHStA, ms Or HS 548

A fantastic line-up for Hülya Çelik's series on "Premodern 'Oriental Literature' & its European Readership". Upcoming: Claudia Römer, Munir Drkić, Gisela Procházka-Eisl, Julia Bray, Pier Mattia Tommasino. I'll speak Dec. 17 about new research on orientalist librarians. (Zoom)

In a World War One-era Canadian scrapbook, among countless anti-German poems: Leigh Hunt’s 1834 “Abou Ben Adhem”.

Very happy to see this new arrival: the catalog for the Vienna Weltmuseum’s exhibition “The European Qur’an”, edited by Jan Loop and Naima Afif, and with Goethe gracing the cover in a portrait by Marwan Shahin.

Oxford Qur’an that served as a working copy for two seventeenth-century Dutch orientalists, Thomas Erpenius & Jacob Golius. Their marginalia show Erpenius’s comparison of the text with other Qur’an mss & Golius’s study of Bayḍāwī's commentary. Bodleian, ms Marsh 358

An index of curiosity: as Jacob Golius (1596-1667) read his sixteenth-century Ottoman copy of Saʿdī’s Gulistān, he recorded questions about details from the Persian text: What is a Kayanid bow? Who were the kings of Nimruz? Sultan Mahmud: quis, quando, ubi? Leiden, ms or. 242

Doodles by nineteenth-century students of Arabic at the École des jeunes de langues in Paris, added to the school's copy of Jacob Golius’s 1653 Lexicon Arabico-Latinum . BULAC, RES MON FOL 1

Looting and Learning: my essay with Jan Loop on the role of looted manuscripts & Muslim captives in the history of European Qur’anic studies, for a special issue of Erudition and the Republic of Letters, “The Turkish Wars and the Study of Islam in Early Modern Europe” brill.com/view/journal...