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medieval worlds • no. 18 • 2023
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Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften Austrian Academy of Sciences Press
A-1011 Wien, Dr. Ignaz Seipel-Platz 2
Tel. +43-1-515 81/DW 3420, Fax +43-1-515 81/DW 3400 https://verlag.oeaw.ac.at, e-mail: verlag@oeaw.ac.at |
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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. 196-218, 2023/06/30
The project »Communities of Knowledge: Interreligious Networks of Scholars in Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa’s History of the Physicians« aimed to examine the social encounters of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish scholars in the Abbasid Near East, in the period 132-656 AH/750-1258 CE. The Arabic biographical dictionary of Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa (b. after 590/1194, d. 668/1269 or 1270) provides rich accounts of such interactions, sometimes occurring directly between scholars, but other times involving much larger networks of people with a wide variety of religious affiliations. Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa weaves these figures throughout his biographical entries, revealing networks of scholarly interchange. In our project, we wanted to discover which people, places, and types of communication he shows as most central to exchange between communities of differing religious affiliations. The networks themselves we understand to be historiographical presentations by a physician who wished to trace the art of medicine through elite practitioners to his present day, relying in the process on both Islamic and other sources, as well as on information from his own broad range of acquaintances in the field. In this project report, we describe three processes crucial to our project. First, we identified and »tagged« people and places in Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa’s text. This included creating entries for each person or place, which also served as authority data to which we could link using tags in the text of the History of Physicians. Second, we created prosopographical »factoids« for passages we wanted to study in detail. These are information nuggets that record in a machine-readable way what we understand the text to be asserting about people, relationships, and events. Finally, we loaded the tagged text and factoids into networks to help identify which persons, places, or features call for in-depth qualitative study in regard to exchange between religious communities.
Keywords: interreligious networks, knowledge exchange, Near East/Middle East, Abrahamic religions, Abbasid caliphate (132-656 AH/750-1258 CE), Arabic, biographical literature, medieval science, medieval medicine, Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa (b. after 590 AH/1194 CE, d. 668/1269 or 1270), network analysis