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Organize your book! Foliation as annotation.

We know relatively much about how authors structured their books (or not). But how did readers engage with books? Much has been said about commentaries and glosses, reading, ownership and endowment notes. Even the colophon has recently received two conferences.{1} What these approaches have in common is their concentration on text. Even if it is paratext, they all focus on signs that are easily read. In this post, I will look at annotation via numbers, namely foliation. Continue reading “Organize your book! Foliation as annotation.”

  1. One was organized by Christopher D. Bahl and Stefan Hanß, another by Sabine Schmidtke—its proceedings have recently been published []

Traces of a mosque library in Ottoman Greece

The manuscript collection in Dresden is among the oldest ones in Germany. It also stands out due to the provenance of many of its manuscripts being connected to the wars with the Ottomans, particularly during the 17th century. Several manuscripts came to the Royal Library in Dresden from participants in the siege of Vienna. In this post, however, I will focus on five manuscripts connected to a different military encounter which has not received as much attention in the historiography as the siege of Vienna. This is the 1685 siege and sack of the Ottoman-Greek town of Koroni and the looting of the library kept in its central mosque.

Continue reading “Traces of a mosque library in Ottoman Greece”