In 2022, Amin Ehteshámi got "The Four Books of Shiʿi Hadith: From Inception to Consolidation" published. Sort of the Shiʿ complement to Jonathan Brown's work on the canonisation of Bukhari and Muslim.
In the Middle Ages, the Shiʿa had three books. In the late 800s/1400s Ibn Abī Jumhūr found a copy of Kulayni's Kafi and promoted that as the fourth. Barqi had a Mahasin before Kulayni, but Ibn Abī Jumhūr didn't rate it; most likely, he couldn't find a full copy. We still can't.
It may be that the Kafi wasn't easy to find either. In fact: none of them were. Shiʿites didn't always have secure scriptoria over the centuries, like the Sunnis enjoyed. A lot of these scholars complain about that; other scholars give up and advise jurists, if you can find one of these three (later, four) then you can go ahead and use that book to run your court. We may suppose that's how the Buyids had muddled by in Iraq.
I take it that when the Safavids took Iran - which had Qom and Mashhad - the Shiʿa could copy those books again. That's more the 1000s/1600s I think.
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