Manuscript Notes as Documentary Sources is the outcome of a workshop, held at the University of Kiel in 2008, on Arabic manuscripts of all periods up to and including the twentieth century and the various kinds of hand-written notes found on them. It contains seven of the original papers and four new ones, and aims to survey the field as it currently stands and mark out some future lines of research. Arabic manuscript notes are important because, together with coins, inscriptions, letters, endowment deeds and other legal records, they are an independent written source for, and a new and promising point of entry to, the medieval and early modern social history of “the Arabic [-speaking/writing] lands”. The editors make a nuanced distinction between such “documentary” sources and narrative ones: the latter “tend to offer a coherent account and/or interpretation of the past and the present. Documentary sources, on the contrary, are rather fragmentary remains that bear witness to specific individual or collective acts”, which does not mean that they too might not be shaped by their writers’ intentions and designed to deliver messages to posterity, but simply that they are less narrativised (Introduction, p. 11). This research field has been slow to gather momentum; the editors point to “a modest peak of interest evident in the mid-1950s, when a number of seminal studies were published” (p. 13); but even they, jumping straight to the 1990s, fail to mention the late Gérard Troupeau's catalogue of Christian Arabic manuscripts in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (which can be read online), of which the first volume was published as long ago as 1972, in which he systematically transcribed the notes made by the manuscripts’ owners and readers. These include references to their professions, family relationships and to historical events, as well – equally fascinating and important – as the marks of their European purchasers. (In a later footnote, the editors do mention Troupeau's 2002 study of the records of endowment of these manuscripts.) They also pass over what, for students of literature, is another seminal early study in this field, Muhsin Mahdi's description, in volume II of his edition of the Arabian Nights, of the Tübingen University MS MA VI 32, whose dating is debated, but which bears on its opening folios the records of its renting out in the Aleppo area in the nineteenth century to readers (and professional storytellers?) (Kitāb Alf Layla wa-Layla min uṣūlih al-‘arabiyya al-ūlā, Leiden 1984, pp. 298–303). All of which only goes to show that even in a comparatively sparse, pioneering field, different specialisms are not always fully in dialogue with each other – an issue tacitly addressed in Hirschler's The Written Word, as we shall see. The contributions to the volume, of which five are in German, one in French and the rest in English, are helpfully summarised and analysed in English on pp. 16–20. They fall into two categories, “New perspectives in the study of [samā‘āt and ijāzāt] notes”: this is the longest-established part of the field, the study of records of attendance at readings of, and lectures on, scholarly texts, and certificates of permission to re-transmit them; the editors include their own contributions in this section; and “Widening the horizon: Assessing other types of manuscript notes”. Among the highlights of this section are Claus-Peter Haase's rapid overview (pp. 121–124) of “Marginal notes from the daily work of an Anatolian qadi in the early 19th century according to ms. ori Kiel 316”, which not only gives insight into local life and the qāḍī's own career but also explains how Kiel's Oriental manuscript collection came into being, and Boris Liebrenz's “Lese-und Besitzvermerke in der Leipziger Rifā‘īya-Bibliothek” (pp. 141–162). Johann Gottfried Wetzstein, Arabist and manuscript collector extraordinary, bought this private, family library in 1853 while he was Prussian consul in Damascus. Liebrenz's paper leads the reader in detail through the detective work involved in accounting for the presences, absences and crossings-out of expected annotations, such as marks of ownership; the self-designations of owners, the rhymes by which they sometimes identify themselves; and above all the tortuous paths by which books entered and left family collections built up, split and restocked over generations, all of which yields valuable insights into the cost of books as compared to the staples of life, the size and briskness of the Syrian book market, individual readers’ tastes (which go well beyond religious and scholarly texts), and the cultural overlaps between Jews, Christians and Muslims. The concluding paragraph points to the over 4,000 volumes collected by Wetzstein and Carlo Landberg and held in Leipzig, Tübingen and Berlin and their potential to expand these sorts of findings. Meanwhile, the website http://www.refaiya.uni-leipzig.de/ now offers German, English and Arabic access to all the Leipzig manuscripts as catalogued by Vollers, which besides being listed and described can be read online, while clicking on ‘Secondary entries’ gives access to a record and analysis of all the manuscript notations. There is also a database of watermarks. This is a magnificent achievement and resource, to which Liebrenz's paper serves as an exciting introduction.

With Konrad Hirschler's The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands it is as if the highly specialised sub-fields described above have coalesced and come of age. This is a book that will interest all social historians and not just Arabic text scholars. Despite its ground-breaking nature, it is essentially conceived as a handbook, and its five chapters are structured for maximum clarity and usability. For the benefit of non-Arabists, or indeed of Arabist non-specialists, the Introduction provides a brief, balanced critical survey of the state of modern scholarship on the written word in the pre-modern Arab world, identifies gaps and theoretical flaws, and explains the issues that Hirschler himself has chosen to address. Chapter 1, “Reading and Writerly Culture”, offers a lucid overview of current debates about literacy and orality in early Arabo-Islamic culture, extends them to later periods, and shows why it has been useful to introduce ‘aurality’ into the discussion of modes of reception and activation of texts. It also reviews the medieval Arabic terminology of reading, explores the organisation of written texts, and finally addresses a core issue of the work: what are “popular” practices in reading and culture? Chapter 2, “A City is Reading: Popular and Scholarly Reading Sessions”, which revisits the same ground as Hirschler's paper in Manuscript Notes as Documentary Sources, narrows the focus, paying close attention to the methodological problems that must be considered when using records of attendance at public reading sessions in twelfth and thirteenth-century Damascus to obtain information about the social composition of audiences and the cultural significance of popular involvement. With Chapter 3, “Learning to Read: Popularisation and the Written Word in Children's Schools”, and colour plates 2 to 15, we reach the most innovative part of the book in terms of subject-matter, social and historical analysis, and the use of architectural and topographical data to plot the shifting map of primary education in late medieval Cairo. Here, too, Hirschler proffers fascinating close readings of visual materials - not only manuscript illustrations but, in the case of Plates 8, 8a-c, a ceramic dish – to show how children were actually taught to form and combine letters. This chapter could have stood as a book in its own right. However, Chapter 4, “Local Endowed Libraries and their Readers” is similarly ground-breaking, and relies on a new find, the inventory of the Ashrafiyya Mausoleum in Damascus, some fifty pages long, whose contents are unexpected: religious disciplines account for only 24% of titles, while adab literature and poetry account for 45% (p. 50; see p. 148 for details of some authors and titles). The inventory's ingenious organisation is equally surprising, in its flexibility and user-friendliness (pp. 153–154). It is a pity that this key document is introduced in dribs and drabs, and that it is only from the caption of Plate 1 that we discover that it is safely housed in Istanbul, and from p. 153 taken together with note 61, p. 162 that we learn what exactly it is that Plate 1 illustrates. The last chapter, “Popular Reading Practices”, addresses a big question that in the past decade or so has been of growing interest to social and literary historians alike: that of the popular epics and their cultural standing, and the relationship between “the great tradition” and “the little tradition” (pp. 181–182) that both pre-modern and modern Arabic high culture and modern scholarship have tended to present as distinct and antithetical. Though Hirschler does not propose such an extrapolation, what this last chapter has to say about the consumption of popular works more generally suggests, as does previous work carried out on manuscript readers’ and renters’ marks – see Mahdi and Liebrenz, above, and Claudia Ott's admirable Metamorphosen des Epos (Leiden, 2003), briefly cited here (note 18, p. 195) – that provision for this consumption needs to be looked at in a continuum that includes not only the manuscript but also the printed text, in the shape of nineteenth and twentieth-century chapbooks, which also carry marks, if of a slightly different kind, of their milieus of origin and circulation and socio-cultural standing, in the shape of end-paper advertisements which describe their contents, list their prices and tell us where they were sold.

Since The Written Word will surely become a standard reference, a few loose ends should be tidied up for future printings; for example, the passage from Ibn Dāniyāl as cited on p. 179 in Shmuel Moreh's translation is hard to make sense of. The bibliography of Ibn Dāniyāl, note 32, pp. 195–196, could have included Francesca Corrao, Il riso, il comico e la festa al Cairo nel XIII secolo: il teatro delle ombre di Ibn Dāniyāl (Rome, 1996) (study and translation), and indeed René Khawam's French translation, Le Mariage de l’Émir Conjonctif (Paris, 1997). ‘The Andalusian judge Ibn Qaddāḥ’ of p. 169 becomes ‘Tunisian’ on p. 172. Since there are so many authors called al-Iṣfahānī, it would help to be told that the one cited on p. 93 and listed in the Bibliography as the author of Kitāb al-tanbīh ‘alā ḥudūth al-taṣḥif is Ḥamza ibn al-Ḥasan (893–970), more usually associated with historiography. It would also be useful to be directed to the primary source of Anne-Marie Eddé's 1992 ‘Un traité sur les enfants d’un auteur arabe du XIIIe siècle’ (= Ibn al-‘Adīm, Kitāb al-Darārī fī dhikr al-dharārī).

Edinburgh University Press are to be congratulated on the standard of production: the book is thoroughly indexed, so that a varied readership can easily identify and follow up points of interest.