medieval worlds • no. 18 • 2023
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Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften Austrian Academy of Sciences Press
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DATUM, UNTERSCHRIFT / DATE, SIGNATURE
BANK AUSTRIA CREDITANSTALT, WIEN (IBAN AT04 1100 0006 2280 0100, BIC BKAUATWW), DEUTSCHE BANK MÜNCHEN (IBAN DE16 7007 0024 0238 8270 00, BIC DEUTDEDBMUC)
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medieval worlds • no. 18 • 2023, pp. 219-245, 2023/06/30
In this paper we discuss the notion of Arabic literary works which, to the best of our knowl-edge, have been lost over the course of history. We examine factors contributing to the like-lihood of transmission, address current interdisciplinary debates, and discuss digital tools applied to estimating the loss of literary heritage or to retrieving information on lost works. Our aim is to highlight the potential that bio-bibliographical works hold for the study of lost texts and manuscripts. Three possibilities are presented for studying lost books mentioned in Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa’s History of Physicians (ʿUyūn al-anbā ̉ fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbā ̉), and these include the identification of lost works in bio-bibliografical reference works, the encoding of attestations for manuscripts written by the authors themselves, and the reconstruction of scholarly networks which contributed to a certain lost work. The examples discussed demonstrate the advantages prosopographical networks can offer if they include works and manuscripts. Therefore, we put a particular focus on the use of machine-readable assertions which involves encoding the claims and statements from primary sources in a format that enables computer systems to process and analyse them.
Keywords: Near East/Middle East, history of literature, biographical literature, networks, medie-val sciences, knowledge exchange, Arabic, lost literature, digital humanities, book history