KONRAD HIRSCHLER. The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands: A Social and Cultural History of Reading Practices.

Abstract

Konrad Hirschler's study of the development of Arabic reading communities in the premodern era is an important contribution to the study of a time period that has not been the focus—at least until recently—of much scholarly research. Its qualities lie in the fact that the author has not only consulted a huge number of primary sources (many of them in manuscript form), but has also integrated his findings into a framework that clearly explores the problematics of the topic and gives due cognizance to previous and current research in the wide variety of genres and disciplines that are inevitably involved. Having established a chronological divide between what he terms an “early period” (pre-tenth century C.E.) and a “middle period” (post-tenth century C.E.), Hirschler contextualizes his project as one that “addresses this profile of scholarship on reading by studying the history of reading, or rather aspects of the history of reading, during the Middle Period in the Syrian and Egyptian lands” (p. 3). Hirschler first identifies the different categories of his source materials (pp. 5–7) and then, in an initial chapter (“Reading and Writerly Culture”), explores a number of definitional issues. He begins with a summary of scholarship on the issue of orality and the development of writing. Here the substitution (or addition) of the adjective “aural” leads to an important refinement in the definition of “reading,” namely “as both … the visual and the aural reception of a written text” (p. 15). A further section in this chapter focuses on the definition of the term “popular,” avoiding the notions of social context and textual characteristics and instead “analyzing concrete sets of reading practices without the a priori assumption that they either pertained to either a realm of popular or high culture” (p. 24).