Why People Matter: A Bio-Bibliographical Approach to Intellectual History

2013 Workshop / Monday 29 July, 2013

In this talk, Judith Pfeiffer describes the prosopographical questions and approaches adopted by her major ERC project From Late Medieval to Early Modern: Thirteenth to Sixteenth Century Islamic Philosophy and Theology (IMPAcT). Judith provides an overview of medieval Islamic history before turning in detail to the prosopographical opportunities and challenges presented by reconstructing the movement of intellectuals and books of the period (in which people not only had multiple roles in relation to books – patron, author, translator, commentator, copyist, illuminator, etc; but also had a wide range of affiliations not found in western learned cultures, for example nisba, legal school, and Sufi organization). Judith concludes by discussing the project’s sophisticated online data entry system for biobibliographical information, which repurposes code originally developed for EMLO-Edit.