In 1900, the German theologian Bruno Violet (1871–1945) was authorized to open the qubbat al-ḫazna (Dome of the Treasure) located in the courtyard of the Great Mosque of Damascus to search for ancient Christian manuscripts, presumably of the Bible. The small building revealed itself to be a treasure trove in which 150 sacks of handwritten material on parchment and paper were found. Among these Violet discovered the famous bilingual Greek–Arabic Psalter in Greek script. The most important fragments for the study of the Bible were dispatched to Berlin to be photographed (the photographs were considered lost until their recent discovery in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin: MS simulata orient. 6; see the digitized version: http://tinyurl.com/nae7mrv). A few years later, the remainder of the collection, composed mainly of Quranic fragments and Arabic documents and identified as some kind of Genizah, were transferred to Istanbul where they are still preserved at the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art (Türk ve İslam Eserleri Müzesi) under the appellation of Şamdan gelek evrâk (Papers from Damascus). It is there that, in the early 1960s, Dominique Sourdel († 4 March 2014) and Janine Sourdel-Thomine had the opportunity to study and photograph them. They both began to make known the results of their research a few years later, through articles devoted to one or two documents, sharing their discovery with some of their students (François Déroche and Solange Ory), but it was almost fifty years before they were able to publish the main core of the collection: the pilgrimage certificates from the Ayyubid period (Paris, 2006) and the present volume consisting of sixty-two documents related to marriage and divorce matters to which their former student, Jean-Michel Mouton, also contributed.

The book under review is divided into two parts. The first consists of a presentation of the origin and classification of the documents followed by a study of the material on which the texts were written and of the significant elements of the formularies the authors identified in the documents according to the classification they adopted: marriage contracts, deeds of divorce, receipts in full discharge for the payment of any remaining part of the dowry, and a few other documents connected to matrimonial relations: a contract for the appointment of a husband as manager of his wife's property, two legal consultations dealing with questions of inheritance, two requests presented to a judge and a private letter addressed by a husband to his wife. The historical, economic and social data are analysed at the end of the first part, bearing in mind that we are speaking of a small body of evidence (roughly fifty women and as many men) spanning around 350 years. Here, the authors address various issues linked to the legal frame in which the matrimonial unions were contracted (the relatively high number of divorces, as half of the documents concern separation issues, corroborates what we already know of the situation in the region thanks to Y. Rapoport's studies). They also survey the price of the dowry as well as the conditions of its payment, and how it evolves through the period covered by the documents, without forgetting the variety of currencies (and sometimes goods) used in such cases. Finally, they scrutinize the social categories represented in the edited texts, noting that, after the Seljukid conquest of Damascus in 1076, the rich families, sometimes with genealogical links to a famous ancestor, disappear from their documentation, leaving the space to some kind of bourgeoisie made up of craftsmen and merchants.

The second part is devoted to the edition, translation and commentary on the sixty-two documents written on fifty-one pieces of parchment and paper. It was decided to order them chronologically: twenty-eight of the sixty-two texts are clearly dated, while the rest are dateable thanks to the mention of the name of a person who could be identified in the sources or on palaeographical grounds. It must be noted that the authors have not applied the rules generally prevailing for that kind of work, be it in the frame of papyrology or diplomatics. Superscripts, insertions, corrections and the like are not specifically identified in the text. On the other hand, they are accounted for in the numbering of the lines while they should be placed in the text according to their location on the document (or at the end of the text if this is impossible for technical reasons), with a distinct numbering. Most of the texts being fragmentary, and at times difficult to decipher, the authors must be commended for the results they have achieved. However, there remain mistakes which cannot be detailed here (e.g. doc. 1, line 15: read Badr ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb instead of Badr ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Naṣr ibn). A general index providing the names of the people and places appearing in the documents and black-and-white plates close the volume.

All in all, the texts made available to researchers in this volume offer a fresh insight into the social life of a city (and an area) for which very little documentary evidence has reached us for the centuries it covers. The imbalance noted between the situation prevailing in Egypt in all periods, and Greater Syria (with the exception of Jerusalem since the discovery of the Mamlūk documents from the Islamic Museum at al-Ḥaram al-Šarīf in 1976) now needs to be reassessed. Nevertheless, the documents edited by the Sourdels with the assistance of Mouton are mere glimpses into Damascene society: their relatively small number and state of conservation (most of them are fragmentary) is counterbalanced by the long period they cover (more than three centuries). This small sample is far from representative and any conclusions drawn from these pieces of evidence must be taken for what they are: partial.