This project examines the history of the Hanafi madhhab in the so-called post-classical period. The Hanafi school of jurisprudence (fiqh) is the largest of the four Sunni schools of Islamic law, followed by more than a third of the world’s Muslim population today: from the Middle East to Russia, the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, as well as China. Following conventional wisdom, the school’s legal methodology and hermeneutics are often characterized as more “rationalist” than those of the other Sunni schools of law. The project examines the implications of this, in the context of a hitherto unexplored corpus of Hanafi legal texts of the post-classical era—works that have been neglected in the field of Islamic legal studies, although their relevance for the practice and study of Islamic law in EurAsia continues unabated to this day. The project will pay particular attention to the complex interplay between legal theory, substantive law, juridical practice and the role of various kinds of political and social authority in the articulation of legal norms. In this, the project hopes to make a meaningful contribution to a better understanding of the history of Ḥanafī jurisprudence in the postclassical period, at the threshold of the eve of modernity.