The production of Arabic multi-block Bibles: A case study of a Coptic-Muslim workshop in early Ottoman Cairo

Famously – and contrary to the usual habit of biblical manuscripts in Arabic – the sixteenth-century manuscript Paris, BNF Arabe 1 embraces an almost complete set of Old Testament books. It only dispenses with the book of Ruth, as a minor defect. A reconstruction of the mise-en-livre of the biblical books in manuscript BNF Arabe 1, which I attempt to present in this contribution, is not only of relevance to abstract codicology, but will permit us to understand the complex relationship between the codex’s content and its production.