Gathering the Orient: Manuscripts, Collectors, Religion

Abstract

The late ancient and medieval manuscripts upon which the fields of Classical, Biblical, Medieval, and Religious Studies have been built contain texts. They are often also displaced objects, carried away from earlier epistemological and material settings, though descriptive catalogues, lists, and monographs only rarely acknowledge this fundamental fact. This dissertation seeks a more ethical way of addressing this history, arguing that studying manuscripts separately from their relevant archival context – or relegating that context to the background – fails to provide an adequate interpretive framework for manuscripts, their texts, and their histories. Through case studies that focus on oriental manuscript collectors and their collections – primarily of textual objects written in Syriac and Arabic – this study puts archival materials about these collectors and the manuscripts they moved back together, raising fundamental questions about access, academic orientation, and cultural heritage. Working around and with manuscripts is an ongoing practice that is fully embedded within a scholar’s, a collector’s, and a collection’s social world. Manuscripts are therefore orientation devices around which worlds revolve, not merely textual or material records of what once happened.