The Ottoman scholar, kadi and bibliophile ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. ʿAlī b. Muʾayyad, also known as Müeyyedzade (d. 1516/922), was famed for his library collection which comprised between 2.000 and 7.000 books. Best known as a kadi and theologian, he also had a keen interest in the belles lettres and the sciences, an interest that he cultivated through his wide network of scholars which reached from Shiraz, where he spent a substantial part of his education during the late 1470s and early 1480s, all the way to Venice and Salamanca. The surviving early sixteenth century inventory of Müeyyedzade’s private library, together with the known extant copies of the works he once possessed, shed light not only on the texts that were available to Ottoman intellectual circles at the turn of the sixteenth century, but also on the quality and extent of Müeyyedzade’s scholarly network and its place in the larger shared intellectual geography of the Aegean, Adriatic, and wider Mediterranean Seas that constitutes the fertile grounds of late Renaissance scholarship – East and West.

Judith Pfeiffer’s research focuses on the social, political, and intellectual history of the Nile to Oxus region with a particular emphasis on early modern Iran, Central Asia, and the Ottoman Empire during the Later Middle and Early Modern Periods. She has a special interest in the circulation of knowledge, and the ways in which political and confessional boundaries were re-negotiated and re-defined during the post-Mongol period. Her publications include History and Historiography of Post-Mongol Central Asia and the Middle East (2006, co-edited with Sholeh Quinn) Politics, Patronage and the Transmission of Knowledge in 13th-15th Century Tabriz (2013), and Rashīd al-Dīn’s Bayān al-haqāʾiq (2016). After receiving a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2003, she taught Islamic studies and Islamic history at the University of Oxford from 2003 to 2016, before receiving a call as Alexander von Humboldt Professor in Islamic Studies at the University of Bonn in 2016, where she directs the Alexander von Humboldt Kolleg for Islamicate Intellectual History.