How and Why It Matters: Material, Visual, and Descriptive Elements in Works Containing Copies of Documents from the Mamluk Period

Various manuals and collections of letters composed by prominent actors of the Mamluk state chancery have been preserved. At the same time, some biographies of the sultans written by historians who were active at the state chancery also include official documents. Several of these sources were edited during the last century, thus contributing to improve our knowledge of the way the Mamluk chancery worked and which types of documents it issued. However, the editing process has not always taken into account the material and visual elements that the copyists of these texts seemed to reproduce faithfully. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, il will review the various material and visual elements, together with other physical details provided by the authors, found in a wide range of manuscripts. Thanks to this analysis, it will be shown how the copies of these texts can help us better understand the significance of these physical elements. Second, it will demonstrate that even though these are only copies of official texts, some of them can be regarded as faithful to the original when it has been preserved, thus granting to these works a historical value.