Marina Rustow

I decipher fragments, discards, erased texts, and other people's letters from the 9th-13th centuries. Most of the texts I read were not intended for later eyes, let alone modern ones. Some were preserved in synagogue storerooms (like the Cairo Geniza), others in mosques; some survived in ruined buildings and or the sealed chambers of mosques and Buddhist shrines; others were dug up from the ground.

My documents are in Arabic and Hebrew, and, occasionally, Aramaic or Iranian languages. They were written by Jews, Christians, Muslims, and, occasionally, Zoroastrians and Buddhists. They document Egypt particularly well; but they cover a swath of the globe that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Malay Archipelago.

Medieval men (and sometimes also women) were surprisingly mobile, even by today's standards. Globalization is not a new phenomenon.

I'm a social historian, meaning that I write history from the ground up, not from the rulers down. I'm interested in how subsistence farmers scraped together their tax payments, how women acquired and retained property, and how Jews and Christians participated in the experimental polities of the first six centuries of Islam.

I'm interested in what brought my sources into being: who could read and write? how did paper became the writing support of choice? how did Arabic script came to look the way it does today? why did documents survive for posterity or fail to?

And I'm interested in how we as historians can know, or claim to know, things about the past, and in how we can tell stories about them that generate as many productive questions as satisfying answers.