Owning Books and Preserving Documents in Medieval Jerusalem: The Library of Burhan al-Din, Konrad Hirschler, Said Aljoumani

This book discusses the only known private book collection from pre-Ottoman Jerusalem for which we have a trail of documents. It belonged to an otherwise unknown resident, Burh?n al-D?n; after his death, his books were sold in a public auction and the list of objects sold has survived.This list – edited and translated in this volume – shows that a humble part-time reciter of the late 14^th century had almost 300 books in his house, evidence that book ownership extended beyond the elite. Based on a corpus of almost fifty documents from the ?aram al-shar?f collection in Jerusalem, it is also possible to get a rare insight into the social world of such an individual. Finally, the book gives a unique insight into book prices as it will make available the largest such set of data for the pre-Ottoman period.