Audition certificates (سماع, طبقة السماع or إجازة) are a salient feature of Arabic manuscript cultures. They are notes written on a book to document the authorised transmission of the book’s text from teacher(s) to student(s). In concrete terms, the text was read out aloud (by the teacher or one of the students) and at the end of the reading session one of the members of this reading group added the audition certificate to the book. By virtue of their participation all students now had the right to act as teacher in future reading sessions.

Audition certificates are brimming with data and can include: the name of the teacher(s), the name of the student(s) (including highlighting those coming late or leaving early), the name of the reader, the name of the writer of the certificate, the name of the book’s owner, the date of the reading, the place of the reading and many other surprises (such as a writer recording the birth of his son during the reading session in the room next door). These certificates contain a wealth of historical data, in particular on persons we do not find in many other sources such as women and slaves. They are thus a source of outstanding importance for fields such as social history, history of ideas, economic history, urban history, historical topography, and biographical studies. It goes without saying that, especially in a comparative perspective with other world regions, such as Latin Europe, this copious material represents a considerable resource for widening our understanding of Middle Eastern societies. 

ACP is the first major project aimed at unlocking the potential of this unique source corpus.  We have started to go through the holdings of selected libraries (Staatsbibliothek Berlin, Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, The Bibliothèque nationale de France, Syrian National Library), but we cannot claim to have identified all audition certificates in the manuscript books on their shelves. We will continue to go through further collections to enlarge this first large-scale and fully searchable corpus of audition certificates. 

https://www.audition-certificates-platform.org/

The research for this project was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy – EXC 2176 'Understanding Written Artefacts: Material, Interaction and Transmission in Manuscript Cultures', project no. 390893796. The research was conducted within the scope of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) at Universität Hamburg.