No document available.
References of the abstract :
From his early thirties to the end of his life, the chancery secretary, scholar and littérateur Ḫalīl b. Aybak al-Ṣafadī (d. 1363) has kept a reading journal, his taḏkira. There, he would write down any text he deemed worthy to remember, texts heard, read or composed. These texts were useful for him in the course of his writing process, for his scholarly and literary production, and probably also for his activities as a chancery secretary, since several documents are recorded in different volumes of the taḏkira.
This paper will explore this last function of al-Ṣafadī’s taḏkira, analysing and contextualising all the documents found in his reading journal. Some of the questions tackled are: Why were these documents recorded there? Would al-Ṣafadī keep a copy of all the documents he composed? Was it a common practice for chancery secretaries? Could there be a link between the scant number of remaining Mamluk documents and the practices of recording them elsewhere?
