Shuwayr Arabic Maronite lectionary with family provenance

[Maronite lectionary]. Kitab al-Nubuwwat al-Kana’isi ... [The Anagnoseis, or Book of Prophecies].

€ 4.500,00

Second edition of an Eastern Christian liturgical text used by the Maronite Church, first issued in 1775, and a mature product of the celebrated Shuwayr press, comprising portions of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha appointed to be read on Festivals throughout the year, according to the services of the Greek Church.

The typography reflects the established house style of the Shuwayr foundry founded by Abdallah Zakher, whose Arabic punches and matrices sustained Catholic printing in Mount Lebanon and the wider Levant for more than a century. The printing office of the Melkite monastery of St. John the Baptist at al-Shuwayr in the Lebanese Kisrawan mountains was operative between 1734 and 1899, during which time it produced in all 69 Arabic books, including re-editions (cf. Silvestre de Sacy I, pp. 412-414; Middle Eastern Languages and the Print Revolution. A Cross-Cultural Encounter, Westhofen 2002, pp. 179-181).

The volume preserves a coherent series of handwritten Arabic inscriptions documenting its sustained use within a Maronite clerical family. An early note dated 1 November 1835 records the book as assigned to the deacon Musa Shukr Allah, specifying that he was nine years old at the time. Subsequent entries record the births of male children within the same family in 1856, 1858, and 1867, reflecting the customary use of liturgical books as repositories of family record. A later and particularly informative inscription dated 19 February 1880 records the departure of the youngest child, later known as Yusuf Awdi Fadl al Surukan (?), for Beirut, to be placed under the authority of Iqlimisi Yusuf Dahud, the Syriac Catholic archbishop of Mosul, for formal education with the Jesuits, explicitly in preparation for priesthood. Together these inscriptions provide rare, continuous evidence of private Maronite clerical ownership, intergenerational transmission, and direct connection to Beirut-based ecclesiastical education in the late Ottoman period.

As a survival of early 19th-century Christian Arabic printing from Mount Lebanon, the book bears witness to the intellectual and devotional vitality of Near Eastern Catholic communities, now further distinguished by its documented life in use.