Matthew L. Keegan: The Stakes of Editing the Unruly Past
Faculty Profile
Matthew L. Keegan is the Moinian Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College. His research focuses on Islamic intellectual history and adab (usually translated as "literature" or "belles-lettres"). In particular, he writes about the commentaries on al-Hariri's Maqamat, a 12th-century collection of stories about an eloquent trickster.
Over the course of July 2020, he is moderating a series of online workshops hosted by the Columbia Global Center in Amman about Kalila wa-Dimna, a collection of stories about fictive humans and talking animals. Kalila wa-Dimna is the subject of the AnonymClassic ERC-sponsored project where Professor Keegan completed a postdoctoral fellowship in 2019. The following post discusses the very different manuscript traditions of Kalila wa-Dimna and al-Hariri's Maqamat.
The Stakes of Editing the Unruly Past
Arabic manuscripts are documents of social and intellectual history. The scribes who copied them, the readers who perused them, and the scholars who scribbled notes in their margins were all involved in shaping the way that manuscripts came to be read by their later readers. When texts from before the dawn of Arabic print culture in the 19th century came to be edited and put in print, editors often erased these testaments to the social lives of manuscripts.
Consider, for example, the case of al-Hariri's Maqamat, which was first read aloud to an audience of scholars in Baghdad in the year 1111 AD. Most copies of the Maqamat do not contain the brilliant illustrations that have become popular on book covers and event posters. Most copies contain the scribbles of later readers who glossed and annotated the text in the course of their reading and study.
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