Mamlūk Poetry, Ottoman Readers, and an Enlightenment Collector

Abstract

One kind of reader’s note that has received minimal attention in scholarship to date is the poem. This article suggests that the verses added by readers to manuscripts can reveal information concerning the social and intellectual history of reading communities, the history of collecting, and the reception of literary works. I examine an appendix of unattributed poems that were added by a group of readers to a holograph copy of Ibn Sūdūn al-Bashbughāwī’s (d. 868/1464) Nuzha (Bodleian Library MS. Sale 13), most probably in northern Syria in the seventeenth century. I identify the poems and their authors, study their manipulation in the Sale manuscript, and offer some initial conclusions as to what they can tell us about the social and intellectual contexts in which MS. Sale 13 was stored before it came to England.