Manuscript Matters and the Persian Arts of the Book in Early Modern Times
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A01=Marianna Shreve Simpson
arts of the book
Author_Marianna Shreve Simpson
Category=AGA
Category=WCS
deluxe manuscripts
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eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
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forthcoming
IranPersia
Islamic art
manuscript production
miniature painting
Product details
- ISBN 9781399555968
- Dimensions: 170 x 244mm
- Publication Date: 30 Nov 2026
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Based on the 2025 Yarshater Lectures in Persian Art, this book presents distinctive aspects – some familiar and others overlooked – of Persianate manuscripts and manuscript making during the early modern period. Its four parts focus on paintings that often come at the beginning and end of manuscripts (frontispieces and finispieces); on the presence and use of page markers on manuscript folios; on the graphic and pictorial style of ‘Abdullah al-Shirazi, a prolific sixteenth-century painter-decorator; and on the image of the book in illustrated manuscripts from Iran and India. Marianna Shreve Simpson explores particular material and artistic features, forms and functions that shaped the making of deluxe Persianate manuscripts over the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, and that contribute to the continuing appeal of this celebrated tradition today.
Marianna Shreve Simpson is Research Associate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies.
She has published, taught, and lectured widely on medieval and early modern Islamic art in general and the arts of the book (especially Persian illustrated manuscripts) in particular. From 1980 to 1992, she helped direct the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, and from 1992 to 1995, served as Curator of Islamic Near Eastern Art at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (Smithsonian Institution). From 1995 to 2000, she was Director of Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Islamic Art at the Walters Art Gallery (now Walters Art Museum) in Baltimore, and continued her affiliation with the museum as Visiting Curator of Islamic Art (through October 2001) and Senior Consultant for the Islamic Manuscript Digitization Project (2009–10). In recent years, she also has served as a consultant for the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, and the Manuscripts of the Muslim World digitization project; as President of the Historians of Islamic Art Association (2011–13); and as Guest Curator at the Princeton University Art Museum. Her books include Princeton’s Great Book of Kings: The Peck Shahnama (Princeton University Art Museum, 2015); Persian Poetry, Painting, and Patronage: Illustrations in a Sixteenth-Century Masterpiece (Yale University Press and Freer Gallery of Art, 1998); and Sultan Ibrahim Mirza’s “Haft Awrang”: A Princely Manuscript from Sixteenth-Century Iran (Yale University Press and Freer Gallery of Art, 1997).
