The World in a Book

A groundbreaking study of one of the greatest encyclopedias of the medieval Islamic world—al-Nuwayri’s The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri was a fourteenth-century Egyptian polymath and the author of one of the greatest encyclopedias of the medieval Islamic world—a thirty-one-volume work entitled The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition . A storehouse of knowledge, this enormous book brought together materials on nearly every conceivable subject, from co