This second chapter serves as a reminder and warning of what the reader should not look for, ultimately guided by prejudices fed by some trends in teaching and historiography: The volumes will not focus primarily on early Oriental scholarship, on early scholarly contacts between Western travelers, experts, manuscript and artifact collectors, and indigenous learned men in the Ottoman Empire or in India. This is a very important field of study, and some of the most important early modern scholars certainly play a role also in these books, such as the chaplains of the Levant Company, Anquetil-Duperron, or William Jones. A catalog of manuscripts collected in the Ottoman Empire, mainly in Aleppo, by Robert Huntington around 1680, copied in Latin by the Parisian Orientalist Eusèbe Renaudot, is presented as a reminder that I am aware of these scholarly activities and the texts that had been transferred from the East to the West. I emphasize, however, that most of these manuscripts remained for a long time read only by a small handful of people in Europe in their Arabic, Ottoman, Persian, Coptic, Samaritan, and other languages and that many of them had not been translated or edited into any Western language before 1800. There were many misunderstandings and “unknowns” about texts and authors, as such a catalog shows. Like Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale itself, such a list, read and copied in Paris while the manuscripts were physically in England, pointed to many unknowns—unknown authors, unknown texts—rather than to the knowns on one’s own bookshelf. This is the case of the “insular” existence of Oriental manuscripts imported into Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I mirror this with the results of the French Arabists Establet and Pascual, who studied the book ownership of the Muslim inhabitants of Aleppo around 1700, also on the basis of household inventories as recorded in the Sicill registers: 275 out of 449 inventories mention at least one “book” (manuscript), and they were able to identify some 863 titles and authors of 1100 titles. It seems that no Cicero, Molière, Shakespeare, or other Western author was found in any of the 275 libraries, although Damascus, as well as nearby Aleppo, had daily contact with Western merchants for decades, if not centuries. Moreover, Damascus residents owned mostly pre-Ottoman Mamluk works, showing that they preserved to some extent a “frozen” preconquest culture some 150 years later. Conversely, I will show that, with the exception of very rare individuals, no average Levant merchant or East India Company servant usually owned an Oriental, Hindi, or other non-European manuscript book, at least in most cases not before 1750. This chapter, therefore, prepares readers for the idea that the first volume, like the others, will attempt to sensitize them to the rather nonoverlapping coexistence of reading communities and the circulation of news in places where the Europeans went in early modern times.

What Was Usually Not in Western Libraries: The Collection of Precious Manuscripts in the Orient

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发表日期：

2026年

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Cornel Zwierlein

摘要

This second chapter serves as a reminder and warning of what the reader should not look for, ultimately guided by prejudices fed by some trends in teaching and historiography: The volumes will not focus primarily on early Oriental scholarship, on early scholarly contacts between Western travelers, experts, manuscript and artifact collectors, and indigenous learned men in the Ottoman Empire or in India. This is a very important field of study, and some of the most important early modern scholars certainly play a role also in these books, such as the chaplains of the Levant Company, Anquetil-Duperron, or William Jones. A catalog of manuscripts collected in the Ottoman Empire, mainly in Aleppo, by Robert Huntington around 1680, copied in Latin by the Parisian Orientalist Eusèbe Renaudot, is presented as a reminder that I am aware of these scholarly activities and the texts that had been transferred from the East to the West. I emphasize, however, that most of these manuscripts remained for a long time read only by a small handful of people in Europe in their Arabic, Ottoman, Persian, Coptic, Samaritan, and other languages and that many of them had not been translated or edited into any Western language before 1800. There were many misunderstandings and “unknowns” about texts and authors, as such a catalog shows. Like Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale itself, such a list, read and copied in Paris while the manuscripts were physically in England, pointed to many unknowns—unknown authors, unknown texts—rather than to the knowns on one’s own bookshelf. This is the case of the “insular” existence of Oriental manuscripts imported into Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I mirror this with the results of the French Arabists Establet and Pascual, who studied the book ownership of the Muslim inhabitants of Aleppo around 1700, also on the basis of household inventories as recorded in the Sicill registers: 275 out of 449 inventories mention at least one “book” (manuscript), and they were able to identify some 863 titles and authors of 1100 titles. It seems that no Cicero, Molière, Shakespeare, or other Western author was found in any of the 275 libraries, although Damascus, as well as nearby Aleppo, had daily contact with Western merchants for decades, if not centuries. Moreover, Damascus residents owned mostly pre-Ottoman Mamluk works, showing that they preserved to some extent a “frozen” preconquest culture some 150 years later. Conversely, I will show that, with the exception of very rare individuals, no average Levant merchant or East India Company servant usually owned an Oriental, Hindi, or other non-European manuscript book, at least in most cases not before 1750. This chapter, therefore, prepares readers for the idea that the first volume, like the others, will attempt to sensitize them to the rather nonoverlapping coexistence of reading communities and the circulation of news in places where the Europeans went in early modern times.