The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition Hardcover - 2017

From the rear cover

"A thirty-volume encyclopedia composed in Cairo in the early fourteenth century contained the world of knowledge available to a Mamluk clerk. Muhanna's delightfully readable book guides us through the intellectual, institutional, and practical circumstances of the composition and circulation of this wide-ranging work. We gain a new interpretation of an old genre, informed by careful scholarship and probing questions about the politics of knowledge."--Ann Blair, author of Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age

"A significant and careful analysis of a previously neglected but crucial text, The World in a Book makes a fascinating argument about the rise of Islamic encyclopedism. Writing with great clarity, Elias Muhanna tackles a very important topic, which had been waiting for its book for a long time."--Konrad Hirschler, Freie Universitt Berlin

"The World in a Book is a superb, original study that makes a major contribution to the understanding of Arabo-Islamic cultural production, Mamluk history, and Arabic literature. Elias Muhanna's book is the first about al-Nuwayri's work in English and by far the finest in any language."--Li Guo, University of Notre Dame