The Most Accomplished Treasury of the Entire Universe: Islamic Books in Seventeenth-Century Paris

• In Event: Manuscripts in Motion in the Early Modern Mediterranean I

Abstract

Seventeenth-century Paris was a laboratory of Islamic manuscript research. Private collectors brought hundreds of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish books to Paris well before the French crown under Jean-Baptiste Colbert became actively involved in the business of Oriental manuscript acquisition. Some of these manuscripts were studied and occasionally used in print publications, yet many translations and studies remained in manuscript and circulated only locally. Moreover, many Islamic books that had been collected in Paris were not even read until the nineteenth century or later. This paper examines the collection of Arabic, Persian and Turkish books in seventeenth-century Paris and what was done with them. Using particular examples, it then considers what we take to be success and failure in Islamic manuscript circulation and, more broadly, in the transmission of manuscript cultures across religious and linguistic boundaries.

Author

• Alexander Bevilacqua, Harvard University