In Arabic and Islamic studies, the subject of variance in general and that of textual variation in particular has not been investigated exhaustively so far.
In the present book the variation in texts of the "closed transmission" will be studied, focusing on a small corpus of didactic and model poems, with a view to establishing what degree of text stability and change was allowed by the medium manuscript. Categories of variance (relating to work-titles, text, number of verses and their sequence, page-layout, context) and the means of controlling them in the manuscripts of the poems...