Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how certain Mamluk litterateurs were able to profit from their official roles as chancery secretaries by using the work they produced in an official capacity to enhance their literary careers. This was done through the ‘publication’ of their official and collegial correspondence.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines how certain Mamluk litterateurs were able to profit from their official roles as chancery secretaries by using the work they produced in an official capacity to enhance their literary careers. This was done, chiefly, through the 'publication' of their official and collegial correspondence. Writers like Ibn Nubātah, al-Ṣafadī, al-ʿUmarī, and others repurposed the official correspondence they wrote on the chancery's behalf for literary purposes and their individual artistic semi-copyright over these texts was clearly recognized and applauded by society. Other writers went so far as to compose manuals for scribes and secretaries who were either employed by or wished to be employed by the chancery. Scholars have remarked upon this copacetic and symbiotic arrangement by which certain literary lights of the Mamluk period were encouraged and supported through the grant of a chancery sinecure and that this professional patronage was often more formalized than that of previous dynasties. In this paper, I will focus rather on the fate of this official material once it has served its initial purpose in correspondence and how it is transfigured by the chancery secretaries themselves in order to fit a professional literary purpose. It is clear that for these litterateurs their official role as chancery secretary was not the one through which they chose to identify themselves and that it was seen, perhaps unanimously, as an adjacent and practical facet of their professional literary careers.