Taking the daunting epistemic leap from browsing through books to reconstructing a library

Qāniṣawh’s court was not the literary barren field that much of the Arabic and Arabic-centred sources, produced extra muros, would have us believe. Instead, it was a rich and vibrant literary site, and a cosmopolitan hub in a burgeoning Turkic literary ecumene. Within this court, we also need to re-centre the ruler himself: No longer the passive object of panegyric or the source of patronage alone, Qāniṣawh has an authorial voice in his own right, one that is idiosyncratic yet in conversation with other voices.

This book offers a reconstruction of the royal library of the early-16th-century Mamluk sultan Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī, based on a collection of 135 manuscripts that were part of it.