Stefanie Brinkmann: “Traces of Eager Studies”

Abstract

The chapter “Traces of Eager Studies” in the catalogue of the exhibition “Manuscripts & Mind” presents the densely annotated manuscript MS Dublin, Chester Beatty Library, Ar. 4326, with al-Baghawī’s hadith collection Maṣābīḥ al-sunna as main text. It illustrates the eager studies and careful transmission of the main text by analysing a number of paratextual features, such as corrections, variants, additional hadith material, and lexical and commentary glosses. Despite a first impression of “messiness”, the chapter shows that there is in fact a system of well-established scribal practices at work. Cognitive experiments, such as eye-tracking and the marking of units in the texts, showed that even non-Arabic speakers could recognise central aspects of layout, while Arabic speakers directed their attention more into the margin, too, detecting textual units of glosses.

Stefanie Brinkmann, “Traces of Eager Studies”, in Manuscripts & Mind. How we read & respond to the written word, catalogue of the homonymous exhibition, ed. Jill Uncle, Dublin: Chester Beatty Library, 2025, 66-71.