Alsancakli, Sasha & Philip Bockholt. 2023. Authorship and textual transmission in the manuscript age: Contextualising ideological variants in Persian texts (Cahiers de Studia Iranica, 64). Leuven: Peeters.
The present volume addresses dynamic and collective authorship by examining how authors and scribes in the Persianate parts of the Islamic world produced, copied, and interpreted texts during the manuscript age within specific cultural contexts, out of political necessity and as a result of professional choices. The processes of scribal adaptation faced by scholars studying the Islamic world in the pre-modern period took many different forms, most of which are still unexplored. The changes applied consist of minor corrections and amendments, as well as full-fledged reworkings of a text and modifications to its core ideological components. Under the label “ideological variations”, this volume intends to discuss any deliberate changes in content, rather than form, made by authors, copyists, and readers intervening at various stages in the process of textual production and transmission.