2026 Articles

The One Which Got Away: A Fifteenth-Century Arabic Fragment from Hafsid Tunisia (WAM Ms. W.580)

Riedel, Dagmar A.

The separation and dispersal of a four-volume luxury manuscript of the Kitāb al-Shifāʾ (“The book of healing”) by the Maghribi jurist Qāḍī ʿIyāḍ (475–544/1083–1149 CE) offers a lens through which to explore the cognitive dissonance provoked by encountering fragmentation within a multi-volume codex that once appeared complete. The separation of the third volume (Walters Art Museum, Ms. W.580) from its three companions occurred in the sixteenth century, within the imperial library of the Ottoman sultans in Istanbul. Already by the fifteenth century, Ottoman readers venerated the Shifāʾ as a work of pious Sunni literature about the life of the Prophet. Literary sources and the extant holdings in Istanbul document that, in the late fifteenth century, the imperial library owned multiple manuscripts with the Shifāʾ’s complete text. Against this backdrop, the independent circulation of an unusual textual fragment of the Shifāʾ suggests a pragmatic approach to library collection management at the imperial library—one in which literary content took precedence over material splendour: aesthetic opulence alone did not protect a textual fragment from being deaccessioned.