Social Codicology: The Multiple Lives of Manuscripts in Muslim Societies

Abstract

Starting from the idea that manuscripts in their material, immaterial, ritual, and recited forms have social lives, biographies, agency, and efficacy, this volume is dedicated to the idea of Social Codicology. It brings together a new generation of interdisciplinary studies which combine history, philology, codicology, and anthropology, which suggest a more social, local, reflexive, inclusive, yet at the same time material perspective on manuscript cultures in the Muslim world across time and space. Moving beyond the dominant focus on manuscripts as inert carriers of text, its focus is on the social framework in which manuscripts and other forms of writing constantly gain meaning through their interaction with communities, thus humanizing the people who write, use, and venerate manuscripts as part of their living, local, and day-to-day understanding of Islam in the past and present.