A wider collection
Birmingham’s Mingana Collection contains Middle Eastern manuscripts in many languages, including Arabic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Georgian, Hebrew, Samaritan and Armenian. The Birmingham Qur’an manuscript is one part of that collection. The institution’s description encourages a view of the holdings broader than the single object for which they are often known.
For legal history, that breadth provides a warning against equating language, script and tradition. An Arabic-language manuscript is not identified as an Islamic legal work by its language alone. Its title, contents and institutional or community setting have to supply the basis for that description.
Catalogues have a history too
The library’s guide to further information points readers to catalogues and selected digitized manuscripts. Earlier printed descriptions and newer digital records can provide overlapping information while using different categories or levels of detail. Their publication histories should remain visible when they are cited.
An older attribution can be valuable evidence of how an item was understood without being the final word on its authorship. If a later record revises it, a research account should identify the change rather than silently combine the two descriptions. This is one way a catalogue becomes a historical source as well as a finding aid.
A multilingual research question
A manageable project could ask how a legal or institutional term is represented across two identified texts. The comparison would need the language of each passage, the work’s genre and the function of the term within its argument. Resemblance in English translation would be a starting observation, not sufficient proof of a shared institution.
The collection’s public guides offer routes into that work. They also help a reader distinguish what has been described from what has been imaged. A serious account can make use of the available objects while naming the material that remains outside the consulted sample. The result is a more informative study of a collection’s possibilities than a claim based on its best-known manuscript alone.
References
- Birmingham: The Mingana Collection
An institutional overview of a multilingual Middle Eastern manuscript collection.
- Birmingham: Catalogues and digitized Mingana manuscripts
Catalogue history and routes to selected digitized manuscripts.
Filed under Manuscripts & history. Sources and corrections.