What do we know about the life of "ordinary" people in the medieval Middle East? What sources can we use to learn about people’s habits, daily struggles, and feelings? How did they work and study? What do we know about their relations with family members, loved ones, and neighbors? How did they relate to the state? What can we learn about their emotional world, and how much did that differ from our own? Through a combination of literary and documentary sources in translation, this course aims to introduce early graduate students to social history and micro-histories. It will present them with both opportunities and limits of studying history from the “bottom-up,” taking the perspective of “ordinary” people, and trying to put ourselves into their shoes.