In eighteenth-century Aleppo, books acquired an unprecedented significance among Aleppo’s Christians, against the background of an expanding “culture of the book”. This paper attempts to reconstruct the library of the Maronite physician Ḥannā al-Ṭabīb (c. 1702–1775), based on ownership statements in manuscripts purchased by the German scholar and Oriental traveller Ulrich Jasper Seetzen (1767–1811) in Aleppo, presently preserved in Gotha’s Research Library. Proceeding from an assessment of the ownership statements and a thematic analysis of the library, the paper will address the implications for our understanding of book ownership in the social and intellectual milieu of the owner. It will be argued that owning books was a facet of an intensifying and active—not passive—preoccupation with literature among Christians.

在18世纪的阿勒颇，随着“书本文化”的发展，书籍在阿勒颇的基督徒中获得了空前的意义。本文尝试根据德国学者和东方旅行者Ulrich Jasper Seetzen（1767-1811）在阿勒颇保存的手稿的所有权声明，重建Maronite医生Ḥannāal-Ṭabīb（c。1702–1775）的图书馆。在哥达研究图书馆。从对所有权声明的评估和对图书馆的主题分析出发，本文将探讨对我们在所有者的社会和知识环境中对书籍所有权的理解所带来的影响。可以说，拥有书籍是基督徒之间对文学越来越强烈和主动（而不是被动地）关注的一个方面。