Libraries of the East, Libraries of the West

Ten days of archival work in Cairo bring to my mind strongly the words of the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, “The East is not quite just East, and the West is not quite just West” (lā al-sharqu sharqun tamāman wa-lā al-gharbu gharbun tamāman). In spite of our facile view of a compartmentalised world, and in spite of stark superficial differences, this insightful observation applies in many fields of human culture. The great libraries of the world, and in particular the great collections of manuscripts, confirm the poet’s intuition, insofar as they owe their very existence and appeal to materials from disparate origins and from a wide range of chronological origins.

It is beyond question that you will find more Italian manuscripts at the Vatican, and more Arabic manuscripts at Dar al-Kutub in Cairo, or French works in Paris, but what really characterises the great collections is that, like complex geological formations, they consist of layer upon layer of historical endowments. This is how, on one hand, they put things rightly in perspective, by showing how dynasties and temporal powers wane in the face of the timeless quest for knowledge, and on the other hand, by opening unexpected avenues of research and presenting the researcher with surprising choices, with prompts to re-think hypotheses, and in short, to do the living work of science, by mercurially adapting, and fine-tuning again and again the delicate balance between phenomena (what we find—or finds us!) and our theories (how we make sense of the findings).

Now, to add a dimension to Darwish’s sentence, and so to share it as it were from the horse’s mouth, I would suggest that the great manuscript collections also teach us that, “The Middle Ages are not quite just Middle Ages, and Modernity is not quite just Modernity.”

Clear periodisation becomes easier and convincing the more we distance ourselves from the manuscript sources. I mean, it is very easy to draw chronological boundaries and razor sharp periods when we are dealing with secondary literature, when we are comfortable in the coziness of the printed page, but when we face the centuries-old accrual of material from before the countries we know, from obscure origins in cities now extinct, and facing even more obscure transmission lines, we have to be chronologically humble, and to tread carefully, lets we are unfaithful to the evidence. In actual manuscript “reality”, there is an intertwining of ages, a beautiful and exhilarating sense of the interpenetration of historical periods which is partly what makes working with primary sources so inspiring, exciting, and challenging! [Juan Acevedo]