About the Exhibit

This online exhibit was partly inspired by a previous exhibition of the same name held in the Audubon Room of the Hatcher Library in January-March 2012. Curated by Pablo Alvarez, Evyn Kropf, and Arthur Verhoogt, a printed catalog of that exhibition was fully digitized and made available online. 

We want to acknowledge our debt to a series of individuals whose work is reflected in the content of some sections of the exhibit. Thus, the section "The Byzantine Bible" is indebted to the work of Nadezhda Kavrus-Hoffmann, whose first volume of the catalog of our collection of Greek manuscripts will be published in 2021: Catalogue of Greek Manuscripts at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (with the collaboration of Pablo Alvarez). Vol. 1. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Similarly, "The Bible in Coptic" heavily borrows from the work of Alin Suciu and Frank Feder (Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities), who recently curated the physical, and online, exhibit, Written Culture of Christian Egypt: Coptic Manuscripts from the University of Michigan Collection. We also want to thank the staff of the Department of Preservation and Conservation, Caitlin Pollock, for her technical support regarding the Omeka platform, and, very specially, Randal Stegmeyer (Emeritus, Digital Conversion Unit) for providing most of the images for this exhibit.  

The University of Michigan Library has placed copies of these works online for educational and research purposes. These works are believed to be in the public domain in the United States; however, if you decide to use any of these works, you are responsible for making your own legal assessment and securing any necessary permission. If you have questions about this exhibit, please contact special.collections@umich.edu. If you have concerns about the inclusion of an item in this exhibit, please contact ask-omeka@umich.edu.

Egypt: From Alexander to the Copts: An Archaelogical and Historical Guide. Edited by Roger S. Bagnall & Dominic W. Rathbone. London: The British Museum Press, 2004. 

Bayani, Manijeh, Anna Contadini and Tim Stanley. The Decorated Word: Qur'ans of the 17th to 19th Centuries. London: Nour Foundation in association with Azimuth Editions and Oxford University Press, 1999. (The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, vol.4 pt.1).

Birnbaum, Eleazar. "The Michigan Codex: An Important Bible Manuscript Discovered in the University of Michigan Library." Vetus Testamentum 17, no. 4 (1967): 373-415.

Blair, Sheila. Islamic Calligraphy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.

De Hamel, C. The Book. A History of the Bible. London; New York, Phaidon, 2001.

Derman, M. Uğur. Letters in Gold: Ottoman Calligraphy from the Sakıp Sabancı Collection, Istanbul. New York: Metropolitian Museum of Art, 1998.

Déroche, François. Les manuscrits du coran. Aux origines de la calligraphie coranique. Catalogue des manuscrits arabes. Deuxième partie: manuscrits musulmans, Tome I, 1. Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1983.

——— . The Abbasid Tradition: Qur'ans of the 8th to 10th Centuries. London: Nour Foundation in association with Azimuth Editions and Oxford University Press, 1992. (The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, vol. 1).

——— . "Written Transmission." In The Blackwell Companion to the Qur'ān, edited by Andrew Rippin (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006): 172-186.

George, Alain. The Rise of Islamic Calligraphy. London: Saqi, 2010.

Haldane, Duncan. “Qur’ans from the Library of the Institute of Ismaili Studies.” In Word of God, Art of Man: the Qur'an and Its Creative Expressions, Selected Proceedings from the International Colloquium, London, 18-21 October 2003, edited by Fahmida Suleman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 51-68.

James, David. Qurʾāns of the Mamlūks. London: Thames and Hudson, 1988.

Kavrus-Hoffmann, Nadezhda. Catalogue of Greek Manuscripts at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (with the collaboration of Pablo Alvarez). Vol. 1. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press (forthcoming: January 2021).

Treasures in Heaven: Armenian Illuminated Manuscripts. Edited by Thomas F. Mathews & Roger Wieck. New York; Princeton, N.J.: Pierpont Morgan Library; Princeton University Press, 1994. 

Pérez Martín, I. “El ‘Estilo Hodegos’ y su proyección en las escrituras constantinopolitanas.” In Πρακτικά του ϛʹ Διεθνούς Συμποσίου Ελληνικής Παλαιογραφίας (Δραμα, 21–27 Σεπτεμβρίου 2003)/Actes du VIe Colloque International de Paléographie Grecque (Drama, 21–27 septembre 2003), edited by B. Atsalos and N. Tsirone, 1:71–130. Athens: Ελληνική Εταιρεία Βιβλιοδεσίας, 2008.

Form and Function in the Late Medieval Bible. Edited by Eyal Poleg & Laura Light. Library of the Written World 27; The Manuscript World 4. Leiden: Brill, 2013.

Mansour, Nassar. Sacred Script: Muhaqqaq in Islamic Calligraphy. London: I.B. Tauris, 2011. 

Nelson, R. S. “The Manuscripts of Antonios Malakes and the Collecting and Appreciation of Illuminated Books in the Early Palaeologan Period.” Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 36 (1986): 229–254.

Sacred: Books of the Three Faiths: Judaism, Christianity, Islam. Edited by John Reeve. London: The British Library, 2007.

Safwat, Nabil. Golden Pages: Qur'ans and Other Manuscripts from the Collection of Ghassan I. Shaker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Smalley, B. The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages. 3rd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983.