Issue 22New Volume of ‚manuscript cultures‘ Out Now

20 November 2024

Photo: CSMC

The recent volume of ‚manuscript cultures‘ unveils remarkable aspects of a multiple-text collection by Ẓahīr al-Dīn Mīrzā Muḥammad Ibrāhīm, a Safavid governor of Azerbaijan in the 17th century and an influential member of the courtly elite who also wrote texts and compiled books.

Ẓahīr al-Dīn Mīrzā Muḥammad Ibrāhīm administered and donated religious and educational institutions in north-west Iran and designed one of the first documented educational curricula known in Iran. As a wealthy and well-educated member of the elite, he spent much of his spare time writing texts and compiling books. The new volume of ‘manuscript cultures’ is dedicated to one of the multiple-text collections that he produced: the Nihāyat alaqdām fī ṭawr al-kalām (The Final Steps in Transcending Speech [or: Theology]), which exists in five illuminated and several unilluminated manuscript copies of varying length and completeness.

Following a survey of the five known illuminated manuscripts opening the volume, four papers in focus on one of these illuminated manuscripts in particular (MS Cambridge, Mass., Harvard Art Museums, Arthur M. Sackler Museum, 1984.463). They address the extraordinary variety and quantity of coloured passages of text, the costly illumination of titles, headlines, diagrams, tables, and decorative elements, the use of at least one imported pigment (Indian yellow), and the challenging complexity of the content, display forms, and production methods. The papers in the second half of the volume uncover the meaning of the some of the complex enigmas about the content, layout, and usage of the works in the collection.

‘A Multiple-text Collection by Ẓahīr al-Dīn Mīrzā Muḥammad Ibrāhīm’ is the 22nd issue of the manuscript cultures journal series. Like all previous volumes, it is available open access and can be downloaded from our website. It is the penultimate volume appear in the old format of the journal. With issue 24, which has already been published this August, manuscript cultures was relaunched as a Diamond Open Access journal hosted by the Hamburg University Press.