Janina Karolewski - Böcker

Manuscript albums are oftentimes contradictory objects: ephemeral yet monumental, coherent yet inviting change. Collecting items made by others, owners form their albums as representations of their selves, their worlds, and their traditions. The volume’s contributors – who come from musicology, European history, English literary studies, and Islamic art history – explore a set of these challenging manuscripts while addressing questions of manuscript studies through their respective disciplinary lenses. The albums under investigation range from Early Modern Stammbücher, or alba amicorum, to albums assembled jointly by nineteenth-century cultural elites, and from muraqqaʿs of the Persianate world to English and North American friendship albums, including some kept by women. This book is the first contribution to the comparative study of manuscript albums, focusing on their materiality and analysing the practices of all those involved in making and using them. Moreover, the collection introduces this hard-to-grasp type of written artefact to the field of cross-disciplinary manuscript studies and suggests albums as a touchstone for manuscriptological theories and terminologies.

Throughout history, manuscripts have been made and used for religious, artistic, and scientific performances, and this practice continues in most cultures today. By focusing on the role manuscripts have in different kinds of performances, this volume contributes to the evolving field of investigating written artefacts and their functions.The collected essays regard manuscripts as points of intersection where textual, material, and performative aspects converge. The contributors analyse manuscripts in their forms and functions as well as their positioning in the performances for which they were made. These aspects unfold across the volume’s three sections, examining how manuscripts are (1) used backstage, for preparing and giving instructions for performances; (2) taken onstage, contributing to the enactment of performances; and (3) performers in their own right, producing an effect on the audience.The diversified, interdisciplinary, and innovative methodologies of the included papers carry great potential to expand the traditional approaches of manuscript studies and find application outside the contributors’ respective fields.

What is a ‘title’ where multiple-text manuscripts (MTMs) are concerned? Titles most commonly denote the individual texts of an MTM – but what about those that indicate the text collection as a whole? Are such titles found in every manuscript? And do they unequivocally refer to the physical manuscript, to the text collection, or both? These and other questions are addressed in the present volume, which analyses the development and roles of titles in MTMs and the influence of those who produce and use these works. By way of an introduction, a conceptual essay first traces the limits of the term ‘title’ for MTMs, then elaborates on the term ‘label’ as a recently proposed alternative. For a broad view of the phenomena in question, a series of case studies illustrates practices of titling and labeling in Greek MTMs from the late Renaissance; selections of Chinese poetry from Dunhuang; legal documents from pre- and early imperial China; secret Shingon Buddhist teachings from medieval Japan; hagiographic MTMs from Ethiopia; small prayer books from the Islamic world; and Ottoman Turkish song-text collections.

This volume examines transmission processes of Alevi religious knowledge and ritual practice in the last decades. It assembles contributions by researchers from Germany, Great Britain, and Turkey. They focus on the question how religious knowledge and ritual practice are constantly (re-)negotiated and (re-)distributed in Alevism and, as a comparison, in Yezidism. These processes are discussed in regard to the conditions of social and cultural change, transnational migration, and globalised communication. In doing so, the contributions to this volume follow different approaches and discuss fundamental methodological issues.