Encyclopaedism in the Mamluk Period: The Composition of Shihāb al-Dīn al-Nuwayrī’s (d. 1333) Nihāyat al-Arab fī Funūn al-Adab
نام نخستين پديدآور
/ by Elias Ibrahim Muhanna
وضعیت نشر و پخش و غیره
نام ناشر، پخش کننده و غيره
Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University Cambridge, United States of America
تاریخ نشرو بخش و غیره
, 2012.
مشخصات ظاهری
نام خاص و کميت اثر
xi, 262 p. :
ساير جزييات
ill., chart
يادداشت کلی
متن يادداشت
مدخل مرتبط: نویری، احمد ابن عبدالوهاب
متن يادداشت
مدخل مرتبط : نهایه الارب فی فنون الادب
متن يادداشت
Code E.Dissertation : 158
یادداشتهای مربوط به کتابنامه ، واژه نامه و نمایه های داخل اثر
متن يادداشت
Bibliography.
یادداشتهای مربوط به پایان نامه ها
جزئيات پايان نامه و نوع درجه آن
Ph.D
یادداشتهای مربوط به خلاصه یا چکیده
متن يادداشت
This dissertation explores the emergence of a golden age of Arabic encyclopaedic literature in the scholarly centers of Egypt and Syria during the Mamluk Empire (1250-1517). At the heart of the project is a study of Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad b. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Nuwayrī’s (d. 1333) Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab (‘The Ultimate Ambition in the Branches of Erudition’), a 31-volume encyclopaedic work composed at the beginning of the 14th century and divided into five parts: (i) heaven and earth; (ii) the human being; (iii) animals; (iv) plants; and (v) the history of the world.My study examines the formal arrangement, thematic contents, and codicological features of this seminal work, arguing that the rise of encyclopaedism in this period was emblematic of a certain intellectual ethos, a systematic approach to the classification of knowledge which emerged in the discursive context of a rapidly centralizing imperial state. I argue that the Nihāya grew out of an amalgam of several genres (including the adab anthology, the cosmographical compendium, the chancery scribe manual, the dynastic chronicle, and the commonplace book), developing into a new form and serving a different purpose from its literary predecessors. Such texts, long considered tokens of intellectual and cultural decadence, demonstrate the strategies used by Mamluk religious scholars, chancery scribes, and littérateurs to navigate an ever-growing corpus of accumulated knowledge.