- In a recent podcast, Amanie Antar (University of Toronto) interviews Gijs Kruijtzer (independent scholar): “How do people justify what others see as transgression? Taking that question to the Persian-Muslim and Latin-Christian worlds over the period 1200 to 1700, Justifying Transgression: Muslims, Christians, and the Law (de Gruyter, 2023) shows that people in both these worlds invested considerable energy in worrying, debating, and writing about proscribed practices. It compares how people in the two worlds came to terms with the proscriptions of sodomy, idolatry, and usury.”
- In “Archival Practices and the Codex: A Mamlūk Protocol on Regulating Markets in Damascus and Its Ottoman Afterlife” (Der Islam), Konrad Hirschler (University of Hamburg) and others explore the “intersection of archival practices, material philology, and administrative documentation in late Mamlūk and early Ottoman Damascus through an in-depth analysis of the codex as a site for document preservation. Challenging earlier assumptions about the absence of archival institutions and documentation in pre-Ottoman West Asia and North Africa, the authors propose a tripartite framework – transmediation, translocation, and book-born documents – to conceptualize the integration of documentary texts and artefacts into codices as a strategy of preservation. Using the case of a 15th-century shurūṭ formulary housed in the Süleymaniye Library (Istanbul), the study focuses on transmediated text added as paracontent by the Damascene judge ʿAbd al-Qādir ibn Mufliḥ al-Ḥanbalī.” [login required]