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Antoine Galland’s French translation of the Thousand and One Nights appeared in 1704. One year later a pirate edition was printed in The Hague, followed by many others. Galland entertained a lively correspondence on the subject with the Dutch intellectual and statesman Gisbert Cuper (1644–1716). Dutch orientalists privately owned editions of the Nights and discreetly collected manuscripts of Arabic fairy tales. In 1719 the Nights were first retranslated into Dutch by the wealthy Amsterdam silk merchant and financier Gilbert de Flines (Amsterdam 1690-London 1739). The Thousand and One Nights and Orientalism in the Dutch Republic, 1700–1800: Antoine Galland, Ghisbert Cuper and Gilbert de Flines explores not only the trail of the French and Dutch editions from the eighteenth century Dutch Republic and the role of the printers and illustrators, but also the mixed sentiments of embarrassment and appreciation, and the overall literary impact of the Nights on a Protestant nation in a century when French cultural influence ruled supreme.

Leiden University Library recently acquired a small collection of Islamic manuscripts from Kashgar, Yarkand, Yengi Hisar and Turpan in the Xinjiang autonomous region of the People’s Republic of China. The twenty-nine manuscripts, collected in the first decade of the twenty-first century by Dr Frederick de Jong, emeritus professor of Islamic languages and cultures, appear to have been used in the curriculum of local madrasa s until the early decades of the twentieth century. Half of these manuscripts have physical characteristics that differ remarkably from what is generally perceived as an Islamic Central Asian binding. To establish whether there appears to be a local bookbinding tradition, and in what respect this tradition differs from the manuscript culture of dominant centres of learning in Central Asia such as Samarqand and Bukhara, the physical aspects of the manuscripts were examined and related to the origin of the text blocks. The comparison could be made at the hand of examples from the same collection that appear to have been produced in these cities.

BEATRICE GRUENDLER and LOUISE MARLOW, eds. Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2004 (= Literaturen im Kontext, Vol. 16), xv + 241 pp., ISBN 3-89500-376-X This volume, containing nine articles, is the resul...

Using university archives and library catalogues as well as letters and diaries belonging to the Schultens, a Dutch family that produced three generations of outstanding Arabists in the 18th Century, this article looks at the circumstances surrounding the purchase of some annotated dictionaries and manuscripts by Leiden University Library.

O ye Gentlemen explores two permanent and vital strands in Arabic culture: the Greek tradition in science and philosophy and the literary tradition. More than thirty essays demonstrate that the strands freely interweave within the broader scope of Schrifttum.