Forgotten Libraries – Lost, Dispersed, and Marginalised Manuscript Collections
A workshop by The Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures (CMTC)
organised by Shaahin Pishbin and Clément Salah (both The Queen’s College, Oxford).
All welcome
This workshop brings together scholars working across linguistic traditions, regions, and historical periods to reflect on manuscript collections that have been lost, dispersed, marginalised, or rendered invisible by cataloguing practices, institutional histories, displacement, empire, and changing political or linguistic orders. It asks how such collections can be located, reconstructed, and reintegrated into the study of manuscript and textual cultures. Across two days, papers will move between collection-level histories and close attention to individual artefacts, fragments, catalogues, ownership marks, repositories, and digital data. In doing so, the workshop explores how manuscripts preserve traces of vanished intellectual worlds, and how forgotten libraries continue to shape the ways knowledge is produced, transmitted, and remembered.
Memorial Room, The Queen’s College, Oxford
9:00 Welcome
9:15 Shaahin Pishbin & Clément Salah, “Introduction to Forgotten Libraries”
SESSION 1: RECONSTRUCTING DISPERSED LIBRARIES
9:30 Henrike Lähnemann, “Superfluous precious objects: Reconstructing the manuscript production of the Medingen nuns”
10:00 Nour Obeid, “Writers’ Libraries as Houses of Trouble: Fragmentation and Reconstruction in the Arab Region”
10:30 James White, “The Hyperlinked Manuscript: Reading and Bibliography in Seventeenth-Century Iran”
11:00 Coffee Break
SESSION 2: ENDOWMENT, COMMUNITY, AND THE FORMATION OF LIBRARIES
11:30 Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, “Endowment practices and the formation of Jewish libraries in the Islamicate world”
12:00 Ronny Vollandt, “A Qaraite Library in 11th century Jerusalem”
Lunch Break
SESSION 3: DISPLACEMENT, EMPIRE, AND RECONFIGURED COLLECTIONS
2:00 Hallie Swanson, “Between Royal Collection and Oriental Repository: The Forgotten Library of Fort William College”
2:30 Gulguncha Lalbekova, “Imperial Legacies and Displaced Heritage: The Case Study of Badakhshani Ismaili Manuscripts in Russian State Archives”
3.00 Coffee Break
SESSION 4: MARGINALISED TRADITIONS AND HIDDEN REPOSITORIES
3:30 Balasubramanyam Chandramohan, “Forgotten Manuscripts: Lost, Dispersed and Marginalised Manuscripts- a case study of Tamil and Telugu Palm-leaf Manuscripts”
4:00 Udaya Cabral, “Hidden Knowledge Hubs: Recovering the Neglected Palm-Leaf Manuscript Collections of Sri Lankan Monastic Libraries”
