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Hosted by: SIMS and Kislak Center
This talk examines the provenance of Islamic manuscripts held in the Royal Library in Copenhagen, tracing the genesis of the collection and its historical contexts from the library’s founding in the seventeenth century to the present. Copenhagen’s oriental collections mirror broader European trends, and they preserve papers, manuscripts, and letters from a number of significant early modern and modern scholarly libraries. These offer an exceptional view into the activities of orientalists and some perspective on basic questions in the history of European oriental studies. Where and how were Islamic manuscripts collected? How did orientalists work together with Muslim and Eastern Christian scholars? What can manuscripts tell us about evolving understandings of cultural difference?
The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies Online Lecture Series presents regularly scheduled lectures related to the study of premodern manuscript books and global manuscript culture.
Paul Babinski, PhD (Princeton, 2020), is a historian whose work explores the history of Christian-Muslim relations and the practice of early modern orientalist scholarship. Since 2020, he has been a researcher with the European Qur’an project at the University of Copenhagen. Currently, he is writing a monograph on the practice of reading the Qur’an in early modern Europe.
Featured Image: Nicolai Abildgaard (1743 – 1809), The Foundation of the Royal Library, 1781-1784.