| Summary: | This paper first surveys the structure, content and purpose of al-Āmidī’s al-Muwāzana, the largest work of poetic criticism of the fourth/tenth century, then its medieval reception, which grants it quasi-encyclopaedic authority. Modern reception has often dehistoricized it by viewing it only as criticism, but book studies suggest broader contexts of interpretation. Looser than “encyclopaedia,” the notion of the “big book,” like those by al-Āmidī’s contemporaries and neighbours Abū l-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī and al-Tanūkhī, fits well with al-Muwāzana. The chronology of al-Āmidī’s life, and the idea of his “big book” as a highly personal work of lifelong scholarship, endorse M.Z. Sallām’s reading of al-Muwāzana as an intellectual ego-document. Finally, the citation practices of fourth/tenth-century “big books” anticipate aspects of the “archival” outlook of Mamluk scholarship and suggest how the “big books” discussed here sought to validate their own versions of cultural memory.
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