Holdings
The oriental manuscript and fragments collection comprises 44 items, mostly from the estate of the Marburg
orientalist Johann Wilhelm Schröder (1726-1793). It mainly consists of Arabic texts but also includes Turkish,
Hebrew and Persian works in addition to a Japanese autograph and a twentieth-century Syrian manuscript.
Collection history
The Marburg holdings are clearly not the product of systematic collection building, but rather the result of
random acquisitions and donations. The first Oriental manuscript that the newly founded university received was a
copy of the Qurʾān, prepared by the student Jacob Vogeley (1631-1712) during a study visit to Leiden. In 1663, he
donated this copy to Universität Marburg where it remained the only Qurʾān text in Marburg for decades. The most
significant additions were Johann Wilhelm Schröder’s Oriental manuscripts and rare prints which the scholar of
Oriental languages and Hebrew antiquities left to Universität Marburg after his death in 1786. Schröder himself
probably added L.S. to the bindings of the so-called “legatum Schroederi” so that the provenance is still evident
today. Sporadic acquisitions after the “legatum Schroederi” includean Arabic prayer scroll, which came to Marburg
in 1904 as part of the holdings of the university library Rinteln. The latest addition is an Ottoman document
which the university library received as a gift in 2012.
Catalogies
The Arabic manuscripts are described in a print catalogue:
Adnan Jawad Al-Toma,
Regine Berlinghof, Uwe, Bredehorn, Die arabischen Handschriften der Universitätsbibliothek, Marburg 1979
.
