Session Abstract

The documentary corpus of the Cairo Geniza contains over 10,000 documents of ‘everyday’ life, in a range that include holiday shopping lists and children’s schoolbook exercises, thousands of letters that crossed the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean, draft petitions to the Fatimid caliph and extensive dossiers of cases heard before the Rabbinic Court. This rich but fragmentary material also offers unparalleled opportunities to study the articulation of networks, and the role of communal, confessional, linguistic, geographical and other axes of belonging in the 11^th and 12^th centuries.  Geniza studies have already been at the center of a debate about the articulation and expansiveness of trading networks, and the degree to which these networks functioned based on formal legal rules or depended primarily on reputation mechanisms and dense ties of family and religious identity.  Theoretical and empirical work on networks is central to recent Geniza studies, and debates about networks will become only more productive thanks to newly enhanced access to primary sources through global digitization efforts and to the recent publication of the Geniza subcorpus that forms the basis of the so-called India Book.  This panel explores new avenues of research about the articulation of the medieval world, the formation of networks of trade and learning, and the nature and limits of communal bonds in medieval times, through the expanding lens of Geniza studies.