Boris Liebrenz: “Putting Margins in Context: Some Practical Considerations”

Abstract

The often non-documentary character of marginal commentaries poses a challenge to those engaging in the exploration of the informative value of these entries. Boris Liebrenz contrasts the margin as a place of intellectual practice with the difficulty of contextualising these annotations in their historical settings. In this contextualising chapter, he presents methodological approaches for two main scenarios, signed notes and unsigned notes. An otherwise unknown signatory might come to the fore through the identification of individual hands, clues given about the annotator in other entries, or by the copyist. A possible identification of the creator of an unsigned note requires the meticulous analysis of palaeography, textual comparison, style, and scribal practices. Liebrenz exemplifies these strategies with three scholars from Constantinople, Damascus, and Cairo in the tenth/sixteenth and eleventh/seventeenth centuries.

Boris Liebrenz: “Putting Margins in Context: Some Practical Considerations”, in Marginal Matters. Explorations into Commenting and Glossing Techniques in Arabic Manuscript Cultures, ed. Stefanie Brinkmann, Leiden and Berlin: Brill Publishers, 2025, 67-94.

The volume is open access