Boris Liebrenz: “Partisan Readers: Fighting over the Interpretation of History in the Margins of MS BnF, Arabe 1825”

Abstract

In his chapter on partisan readers, Boris Liebrenz moves two less common aspects of marginal annotation to centre stage: the comparatively rare marginal commentaries in manuscripts containing works of history, and a personal, polemic voice writing in the margin. In the margins of a manuscript containing the historiographic work Badāʾiʿ al-umūr by the tenth/sixteenth-century Mamluk Ibn Iyās, an Ottoman reader writes annoyed replies to the negative representation of the Ottoman sultan Selim I in the central text. Arguing over the interpretation of the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517 and the depiction of the Ottoman and Mamluk rulers, such a polemical style remains unusual, reminding us that there was usually some kind of ethics at work in the margin.

 Boris Liebrenz: “Partisan Readers: Fighting over the Interpretation of History in the Margins of MS BnF, Arabe 1825”, in Marginal Matters. Explorations into Commenting and Glossing Techniques in Arabic Manuscript Cultures, ed. Stefanie Brinkmann, Leiden and Berlin: Brill Publishers, 2025, 249-265.

 The volume is open access