The Unruly Books of Abdisho of Nisibis

A catalogue as a list, more precisely a book list, is the focus of Liv Ingeborg Lied’s contribution. Lied critically engages scholarship on the list of Old Testament books in Abdisho of Nisibis’s (d. 1318) Syriac Catalogue of the Books of the Church. Focusing on the trajectories in scholarship that have focused on the Christian biblical canon and the lost books of early Judaism, she explores the entries that have proven challenging to this scholarship. The unruly entries of Abdisho’s list fall into three categories: writings that are only known by title and which do not survive as extant and available texts, writings known by multiple titles, and entries that do not comply with the scholarly imagination of an Old Testament book. A new look at the epistemological and ontological status of these categories of entries provides a correction to the treatment of book lists by modern and contemporary scholars and a new appreciation of the many ways of knowing (about) books in a manuscript culture.