Owning Books and Preserving Documents in Medieval Jerusalem: The Library of Burhan Al-Din

By Konrad Hirschler and Said Aljoumani

This book discusses the only known private book collection from pre-Ottoman Jerusalem for which we have a trail of documents. It belonged to an otherwise unknown resident, Burhān al-Dīn; after his death, his books were sold in a public auction and the list of objects sold has survived.This list - edited and translated in this volume - shows that a humble part-time reciter of the late 14th century had almost 300 books in his house, evidence that book ownership extended beyond the elite. Based on a corpus of almost fifty documents from the Ḥaram al-sharīf collection in Jerusalem, it is also possible to get a rare insight into the social world of such an individual. Finally, the book gives a unique insight into book prices as it will make available the largest such set of data for the pre-Ottoman period.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1474492061
• ISBN13: 9781474492065
• Release Date: February 2023
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Length: 394 Pages
• Weight: 1.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.3" x 9.3"