Manuscript albums are oftentimes contradictory objects: ephemeral yet monumental, coherent yet inviting change. Collecting items made by others, owners form their albums as representations of their selves, their worlds, and their traditions. The volume’s contributors – who come from musicology, European history, English literary studies, and Islamic art history – explore a set of these challenging manuscripts while addressing questions of manuscript studies through their respective disciplinary lenses. The albums under investigation range from Early Modern Stammbücher, or alba amicorum, to albums assembled jointly by nineteenth-century cultural elites, and from muraqqaʿs of the Persianate world to English and North American friendship albums, including some kept by women. This book is the first contribution to the comparative study of manuscript albums, focusing on their materiality and analysing the practices of all those involved in making and using them. Moreover, the collection introduces this hard-to-grasp type of written artefact to the field of cross-disciplinary manuscript studies and suggests albums as a touchstone for manuscriptological theories and terminologies.

This volume examines transmission processes of Alevi religious knowledge and ritual practice in the last decades. It assembles contributions by researchers from Germany, Great Britain, and Turkey. They focus on the question how religious knowledge and ritual practice are constantly (re-)negotiated and (re-)distributed in Alevism and, as a comparison, in Yezidism. These processes are discussed in regard to the conditions of social and cultural change, transnational migration, and globalised communication. In doing so, the contributions to this volume follow different approaches and discuss fundamental methodological issues.