The documents from the Ḥaram al-sharīf in Jerusalem constitute one of the most important corpora from the pre-Ottoman Middle East covering broad areas of social, political, cultural and economic history. The first documents from the Ḥaram al-sharīf in Jerusalem were discovered in the 1970s and described by Donald Little (Catalogue of the Islamic Documents, Beirut/Wiesbaden 1984). In recent years, approximately 100 new documents have been discovered that are described in this catalogue. This catalogue sets the new corpus in relation to the ‘old’ corpus and highlights its potential for future scholarship. The main part is a description of all documents, including size, materiality, summary, editions of beginning/end of document as well as a list of personal names, place names and names of witnesses. The volume also includes the edition of ten fascinating documents (five Persian, five Arabic) with high-quality reproductions of the originals. Finally, the volume includes a list of all Ḥaram al-sharīf documents edited so far.

This book discusses the only known private book collection from pre-Ottoman Jerusalem for which we have a trail of documents. It belonged to an otherwise unknown resident, Burhan al-Din; after his death, his books were sold in a public auction and the list of objects sold has survived.This list - edited and translated in this volume - shows that a humble part-time reciter of the late 14th century had almost 300 books in his house, evidence that book ownership extended beyond the elite. Based on a corpus of almost fifty documents from the Haram al-sharif collection in Jerusalem, it is also possible to get a rare insight into the social world of such an individual. Finally, the book gives a unique insight into book prices as it will make available the largest such set of data for the pre-Ottoman period.