This book started with a discovery. In September 2000, a specialist in Islamic manuscripts at Christie’s auction house in London called Emilie—who specializes in the history of Islamic science—and asked her if she could come into London from Oxford and look at ..
Yossef Rapoport and Emilie Savage-Smith
Emilie Savage-Smith, FBA, has recently retired as Professor of the History of Islamic Science at the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford. She continues as Fellow Archivist of St Cross College and is the recent recipient of a Senior Investigator Award in Medical Humanities from the Wellcome Trust for the project A Literary History of Medicine: The ‘Best Accounts of the Classes of Physicians’ by Ibn Abi Usaybiʿah (d. 1270). Her most recent publications include A New Catalogue of Arabic Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Volume I: Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2012), and (with co-author Yossef Rapoport) An Eleventh-Century Egyptian Guide to the Universe: The ‘Book of Curiosities’, edited with an annotated translation (Leiden: Brill, 2013); and ‘In Medieval Islamic Cosmography, where is Paradise?’ in The Cosmography of Paradise: The Other World from Ancient Mesopotamia to Medieval Europe, ed. Alessandro Scafi (London: Warburg Institute, 2016).
Yossef Rapoport is a reader in Islamic History, Queen Mary University of London. He is a historian of the social, cultural and legal aspects of life in the Islamic, Arabic-speaking Middle East in its Middle Ages, from about 1000 to 1500 AD. His publications include Rural Economy and Tribal Society in Islamic Egypt. A Study of Al-Nābulusī’s Villages of the Fayyum (Brepols, 2018); with Ido Shahar (ed. & trans.), The Villages of the Fayyum: A Thirteenth-Century Register of Rural, Islamic Egypt (Brepols, 2018); with Emilie Savage-Smith, An Eleventh-Century Egyptian Guide to the Universe. The 'Book of Curiosities', edited with an annotated translation (Leiden: Brill, 2014); with Shahab Ahmad , Ibn Taymiyya and His Times, (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2010), and Marriage, Money and Divorce in Medieval Islamic Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). In December 2018, he was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for a new project on processes of tribalization and conversion to Islam among the rural communities of the medieval Middle East.