A Monument to Medieval Syrian Book Culture : The Library of Ibn ?Abd al-Hadi

In the late medieval period, manuscripts galore circulated in Middle Eastern libraries.

Yet very few book collections have come down to us as such or have left a documentary trail.

This book discusses the largest private book collection of the pre-Ottoman Arabic Middle East for which we have both a paper trail and a surviving corpus of the manuscripts that once sat on its shelves: the Ibn ?Abd al-Hadi Library of Damascus.

The book suggests that this library was part of the owner’s symbolic strategy to monumentalise a vanishing world of scholarship bound to his life, family, quarter and home city.