The workshop participants will focus on two issues. First the unique value of the Genizah to the economic history of the medieval Middle East, of the quantitative data they provide. I will examine two cases, first the significance of the statistics I derived from the marriage and family gifts data to social and economic history, the second, the data I collected and analyzed on manuscript production, paper making, and the decline in the price of books, and its significance for estimating literacy rate. The second issue is why relying solely on the Geniza risks producing misconstrued historical analysis.
