Introduction
Recent studies have begun to uncover the existence of what we might term systems of “hermeneutics by implication” within medieval Islamicate anthology cultures. Standing in contrast to techniques of explicit analysis such as commentary (sharh) and exegesis (tafsir), hermeneutics by implication depend on the juxtaposition of complementary motifs, ideas or texts, which help to explain one another. Such juxtapositions, created by editorial design, encourage readers to discover connections between materials which are often superficially disparate, and aid in their interpretation. For example, as Adam Talib shows, certain collections of Arabic verse, such as Kitāb al-muḥibb wa-l-maḥbūb wa-l-mashmūm wa-l-mashrūb (The Book of Lover, Beloved, Musk and Wine)Footnote 1 by al-Sarī al-Raffāʾ (d. c. 362/972), juxtapose poems with overlapping formal features or imagery, often without gloss or comment, to create “a subtle, inexplicit progression of thematic and rhetorical movements.”Footnote 2 The primary function of such juxtapositions may have been to inculcate the tenets of practical literary criticism in readers without recourse to long-winded analysis; in other words, they make a work instructive and underscore its pedagogical utility, but they keep it readable. Similarly, Beatrice Gruendler writes of the associative approach adopted by Ibn Abī Ḥajala (d. 776/1375) in his prosimetric work Sukkardān al-sulṭān (The Sultan’s Sugar-Bowl), stating that the book’s appendices are rendered coherent by a “mesh of variegated motifs that strings together the widest possible array of historical, geographic, religious, legendary, literary and medical tidbits.”Footnote 3 Again, these juxtapositions bind the text together and allow the author considerable scope to explore different intellectual fields which help to elucidate one another. These examples go to show that, although many of us may be used to thinking of the production of meaning as a phenomenon founded on techniques involving discussion and analysis, critical culture is not always explicit.Footnote 4 Rather than explaining what a passage means, a book’s editors can provide readers with a framework for reading in and undertaking analyses through their arrangement of material. This is not a question of readers attaching randomly subjective meanings to texts—although such readings are always possible—but one of authors and editors encouraging particular programs of eisegesis.Footnote 5
This article applies the concept of hermeneutics by implication to a Persian manuscript anthology of the early fifteenth century. The codex in question is British Library Add. MS. 27261,Footnote 6 a luxury pocket-sized collection of twenty-three texts covering the diverse fields of literature, law, medicine, alchemy, theology, history, astronomy and mathematics, which was produced in 813‒14/1410‒11 for Eskandar b. ʿOmar Sheykh (d. 818/1415), the Timurid ruler of Fars.Footnote 7 The manuscript has been studied extensively by historians of art on account of the value of its paintings and marginal decoration.Footnote 8 It has also received attention from modern editors, because it is an early source for the history of several late medieval texts, including the divān of Hāfez.Footnote 9 Furthermore, the poets whose writings it contains have been catalogued in detail by scholars of Persian literature.Footnote 10 It is therefore well known. However, it has never been examined as a coherent intellectual enterprise, in which texts, images and decoration are juxtaposed in order to help explain one another.Footnote 11 My focus here is on how the anthology’s creators may have intended Eskandar, its first owner and reader, to view the manuscript. While attention is now being paid to connecting Eskandar’s theological and political program with his patronage of the arts, I stop short of arguing that the schemes of reading suggested in the anthology are either unique or reflective of a particular political philosophy.Footnote 12 Yet I do contend that its physical integration of texts and images renders the anthology something like a puzzle, from which Eskandar may have been intended to derive benefit. The book was not just a beautiful object and a compilation of instructive writings, but also a tool designed to feed Eskandar’s intellectual experiments with different forms of knowledge, and the interaction between texts and images was an important part of how it operated.
Text Block and Margin: Associative Methods of Arrangement
Add. MS. 27261 develops trends seen in extant books of the late fourteenth century. As in the so-called Behbahān Anthology of 801/1398 (Türk ve Islam Eserleri Müzesi, 1950), one text is presented in the central text block (matn) of each page, and another text is generally wrapped around the margin (hāshiyyeh).Footnote 13 The presence of two texts on each page, which was partly a practical way of saving space and reducing the physical bulk of the manuscripts, meant that paintings had to be integrated into the two anthologies in imaginative ways.Footnote 14 In both cases, images often occupy the text block, replacing the central text but leaving the marginal text in place. So, in Add. MS. 27261, fourteen of the twenty large-scale paintings are not juxtaposed with the text that they appear to illustrate, but are instead surrounded by a marginal text. Of the remaining six large-scale paintings in the manuscript, five are full-page and are not juxtaposed with any text, and one begins beneath a section of both central and marginal text. Most of the paintings in the opening section of the manuscript, which depict scenes from Nezāmi Ganjavi’s (d. ca. 602‒12/1205‒15) Khamseh (Quintet), are in fact surrounded by one of three marginal texts: ʿAttār’s (d. 618/1221) Elāhināmeh (Divine Book), the same poet’s Manteq al-teyr (The Oration of the Birds), and a miniature anthology of early and late medieval poetry which is arranged by form and genre. Later paintings are organized in a similar way. For example, f. 298b, “Rostam Rescues Bizhan from the Well,” a scene which illustrates a passage from Ferdowsi’s (d. 410 or 416/1019 or 1025) Shāhnāmeh (The Book of Kings), is surrounded by the text of Beyzavi’s (d. between 685/1286 and 716/1316) Nezām al-tavārikh (The Order of Histories), a history of Iran. The painting on f. 371b (“A Patient Sits in Bed while a Doctor Feels His Pulse”), which responds to a treatise on astrology and the interpretation of dreams, is surrounded by a marginal text on medicine.
Figure 1. Add. MS. 27261 f. 337a: Ghazals by Hasan Dehlavi; astrological treatise. © The British Library Board.
An obvious question arises: can any sense of design be discerned in the juxtapositions of central and marginal texts throughout the manuscript, and, if so, how might this affect our viewing of the paintings? A simple answer is that the central and marginal texts are always arranged in a fashion which allows for cross-readings in theme and genre. For example, the narratives of Nezāmi Ganjavi’s Khamseh harmonize well with those of ʿAttār’s masnavis because both works often use storytelling as a vehicle for exploring ethical precepts.Footnote 15 The extracts from the part-mythological, part-historical Shāhnāmeh can be read in parallel with the accounts of Beyzavi’s Nezām al-tavārikh, the earliest sections of which cover the same dynasties as Ferdowsi’s text.Footnote 16 The alchemical treatise Tohfat al-gharāʾeb (The Gift of Curiosities) is comparable with the qasāʾed on the Prophet and the Shiʿite imams which are presented on the same pages, because occult knowledge was perceived to be something “latent” in the imams.Footnote 17 Esmāʿil ebn Hasan Jorjāni’s (d. 531/1136‒37) medical treatise Khoffi-ye ʿalāʾi (roughly, ʿAlaʾ al-Dowleh’s Pocket Book)Footnote 18 can be read alongside works on the law and astrology because legal prescriptions affected the human body, and it was commonly accepted that the movements of the heavenly bodies made people well or ill.Footnote 19 For similar reasons, Shahmardān ibn Abi l-Kheyr’s (lived eleventh century) book on astronomy and astrology, Rowzat al-monajjemin (The Astronomers’ Garden), works well alongside treatises on veterinary medicine, alchemy and knowledge of God: the prime mover turns the heavenly bodies, which in turn influence animal (and human) health, and bring about changes in precious metals.Footnote 20 Thus, the anthology’s texts appear to be organized in an associative way in order to complement one another. This method of arrangement breaks down barriers between different genres and emphasizes points of continuity between texts.
Yet we can go further than simply speaking of broad correspondences between the texts. Throughout Add. MS. 27261, the central and marginal material is organized so that complementary readings can be made on every page. Two examples, which are entirely typical, and which are drawn at random from different parts of the manuscript, illustrate this point. On f. 142b, a common reading emerges between the text block and the margin. Here, the matn contains part of the introduction to Nezāmi’s Haft Peykar (The Seven Beauties), while the beginning of a miniature anthology of poetry runs around the hāshiyyeh. Nezāmi enjoins his patron to recognize the majesty and bounty of God, and then praises speech as His only undying creation. These sentiments harmonize well with the marginal poems, which are all exordiums on the unity of God. One particular line from a poem by ʿEmādi Shahriyāri (also known as ʿEmād al-Din Ghaznavi, d. 573/1177‒78 or 582/1186‒87) stands out, because it unites the ideas of speech and divine majesty: “Praise be to the Creator, who arranged in two words / These seven domes which extend for six days.”Footnote 21 Thus, a clear dialogue concerning the nature of divine speech emerges from this page. The reference to the “seven domes” (haft qobbeh) of the seven heavens in ʿEmādi Shahriyāri’s poem also brings us back to the text in the matn, emphasizing the cosmological significance of the number seven in the Haft Peykar, and reminding us of the episode in Nezāmi’s text in which Bahrām constructs seven domes to house the seven princesses.
Another example of harmonization comes from f. 337a, where lyric ghazal poems by Hasan Dehlavi (d. ca. 738/1338) are surrounded in the margin by passages from an introduction to astrology which explain when is the best time to undertake actions such as buying property, sowing crops, beginning a student’s education, taking medicine, engaging in therapeutic bloodletting, and going to town (Figure 1).Footnote 22 Correspondences emerge from reading across the two texts, as the following lines by Hasan show: “What will happen to me today at dawn? / Pour that scarlet shower of pearls into the goblet / Nothing is better than the wine cup / Take my pen and paper away.”Footnote 23 While the first of these two lines is ostensibly about wine, the image of pouring red liquid into a bowl recalls the practice of therapeutic bloodletting that is mentioned in the margin.Footnote 24 The reference to books and pens evokes the discussion of when to begin a student’s education. Moving over to the next page (f. 337b), one of Hasan’s poems speaks of abjuring oaths: “Once again, we have broken our pledge to the beloved / We repented and then recanted.”Footnote 25 The topic is mirrored in the marginal discussion of when to bind oneself to others through oaths. To the right of the text block, Hasan’s narrator begs his interlocuter to clothe him in the garb of nobility, while marginal comments at the top of the page discuss when one should importune others.
Figure 2. Add. MS. 27261 ff. 277b‒8a: Eqbālnāmeh of Nezāmi; a qasideh in praise of Eskandar Soltān. © The British Library Board.
A striking case of correspondence comes on ff. 277a‒8b of the manuscript (Figure 2). The text of the matn is from Nezāmi’s Eqbālnāmeh (The Book of Felicity). In the narrative, Eskandar (Alexander the Great) has just reached the point of prophecy and is receiving the testaments of the assembled Greek philosophers; the text here consists of the ethical counsels of Aristotle, which are concerned with how a man who is both a prophet and a king should comport himself. They include the lines: “If a king repents of his justice / The state will be ruined / God created you for the sake of justice / Tyranny cannot come from an unjust king.”Footnote 26 The margin contains a long qasideh by the poet Basāti Samarqandi (d. 840/1436 or 37) composed in praise of Eskandar Soltān.Footnote 27 Highlighting in red ink makes certain phrases in Basāti’s panegyric stand out, among them: “Eskandar, consider this, and think the rest all tales / This speech is correct, all others are storytellers”;Footnote 28 “You are Eskandar, more pleasant than the fount of life,”Footnote 29 an image recalling the adventures of Nezāmi’s hero in the land of darkness;Footnote 30 and “the law laid down by your considered view heals the kingdom and the faith / The path of your rule is the straight way through certitude.”Footnote 31 These phrases simultaneously identify Eskandar Soltān with Nezāmi’s hero and distinguish him. Like Nezāmi’s Eskandar, he is a prophet,Footnote 32 and a king whose rule has the power to lead the community in accordance with God’s laws. Yet he is real, whereas Nezāmi’s Eskandar is one of the fictive “tales” which Basāti mentions; and he is “more pleasant” than the fount of life, which Nezāmi’s Eskandar fails to find.Footnote 33 It is worth adding that this case provides some additional support for the theory that the visual representations of Nezāmi’s Eskandar on ff. 225b, 230a and 286a of Add. MS. 27261 double as portraits of Eskandar Soltān.Footnote 34
The examples given above testify to what extent texts can be manipulated when they are reproduced within the book. As with other late medieval editors, both in Iran and elsewhere, the makers of Add. MS. 27261 do not seem to have had a strong interest in establishing a “fundamental” edition of each text in the anthology. Rather, they abridged and arranged them in order to create coherence on each page, a productive framework which would stimulate the reader’s critical investigation of the underlying patterns between material. To give one example of their manipulation of texts, their recension of the astrological work Madkhal-e manzum displays significant differences with the modern print edition, which does attempt to reconstruct an original text. Passages are absent from Add. MS. 27261, and the order of many is inverted. The resulting recension cannot simply be imputed to a poor-quality or defective textual source. It reflects a literary culture in which the original intentions of a text’s author were sacrificed to editorial concerns about the coherence of the page.
Illustration, Analogy and Independent Scene: Images and Marginal Texts
The associative arrangement of material throughout the anthology is not only confined to the written texts. Complementary readings can be made in all cases in the manuscript where a painting is surrounded by a marginal text. This is not a case of direct correspondence, but rather a form of juxtaposition which gives rise to overlapping interpretative strategies. The editors’ method of arrangement affects our understanding of the paintings because it forces them to operate on more than one level, meaning that they not only depict events from works such as Nezāmi’s Khamseh and Ferdowsi’s Shāhnāmeh, but also act as spaces for contemplating a connected set of ideas. Contrary to what one might assume, this does not render them more dependent on the texts, but rather emphasizes their independence as images in which different meanings can converge.
Figure 3. Add. MS 27261 f. 118a: Majnun and the animals; ʿAttār’s Elāhināmeh. © The British Library Board.
A good example of this phenomenon is f. 118a, which features a painting depicting Majnun’s establishment of just rule over the animals in the matn, and, in the margin, text describing the Prophet’s invitation to the jinn and animals to attend him (Figure 3). On looking at the marginal text and the painting together, the viewer is invited to think of parallels between Majnun and the Prophet, to compare their ethical stances, and thereby to gain new interpretative perspectives on both the text and the image. The comparison created by the juxtaposition counters Nezāmi’s statement that Majnun himself became like a wild beast among the animals, and dispels any doubt over whether Majnun should be taken as a positive ethical exemplum.Footnote 35
On f. 38a, the painting is of Shirin gazing at Khosrow’s portrait, while the marginal text describes the passion of the slave Ayāz for his master, Mahmud of Ghazneh. The image and the text are united by more than the general theme of lovers and beloveds. Both treat the desire of the beloved for their lover, inverting the common topos of the lover as the active pursuer of the beloved. While we look at Shirin beholding her lover, we can read the following lines in the margin:
The juxtaposition of this text with the image of Shirin looking at Khosrow leads to a kind of harmonization, in which the visual and the verbal elements of the page debate a shared theme.
Figure 4. Add. MS. 27261 f. 159b: Torktāz and Torktāzi; marginal lyric and gnomic poems. © The British Library Board.
How do the paintings work in conjunction with texts which are not narratives? The image on f. 159b responds to one of the embedded anecdotes from Nezāmi’s Haft Peykar (Figure 4). It depicts the story’s hero, Torktāzi, being handed a cup of wine by Torktāz, the fairy queen, who is about to undress in front of him but first enjoins him to close his eyes. He opens them to find himself back in the basket that transported him to her domain.Footnote 37 This story, in which the protagonist must unravel truth from sensible reality, and only recognizes what has happened to him when his adventure is over, is given a new interpretative slant by the marginal lyric poems. One by Shahid BalkhiFootnote 38 reads: “Like the narcissus and the rose, knowledge and the means / Do not bloom together in the garden / Whoever has the knowledge has no means / And whoever the means, little knowledge”;Footnote 39 another by Maʿrufi BalkhiFootnote 40 states: “Bring the wine cup to me and let me sip from your lips / For your lips would turn poison into limpid wine / If I see your face, wine becomes licit for me / Since wine has overcome me, it must be licit”;Footnote 41 and finally, one ascribed to ʿAmāri says: “O wonder, they have lit a fire in the water / Look at that wine-cup and that wine.”Footnote 42
As with the other examples given above, these lines do not break Nezāmi’s text open and analyze it, but they offer a way of understanding the image by intersecting with it. In the first verse quoted here, the sardonic suggestion that knowledge and ability are diametrically opposed parallels Torktāzi’s postponed recognition of what has happened to him. In the second poem, the lover’s kiss is aligned with a kind of cure-all that alters our powers of perception for the better. The half-line complements Nezāmi’s story, in which the protagonist’s hard lesson in love changes his understanding of the world. The last poem is ekphrastic, and can be read as a playful appeal to the viewer to look at the image of the two would-be lovers drinking wine.
It has been contended that the paintings in the first half of Add. MS. 27261 “deal with causes and effects. The narrative elements of poetry are emphasized.”Footnote 43 Yet this characterization only addresses one aspect of how these images function on the page. They are imbricated in a set of meanings which the viewer creates by moving their eyes between image and text. On one level, the painting on f. 159b visualizes an episode from Haft Peykar; on another it is simply a decorative scene which recalls many other depictions of enthroned lovers; but on a third level, it is an analogy which intersects with the themes and topoi of the lyric poetry that surrounds it. When viewed in conjunction with the image, the marginal poems impart a life lesson, enjoining the viewer to approach love with their eyes open. They also underscore the process of thinking through visual experience, a theme with which Nezāmi’s text is concerned, but which—obviously—takes on a heightened significance within the context of the painting.
Two final examples fully demonstrate the complexity of text‒image relationships in MS. Add. 27261. The double-page painting on ff. 362b‒3a provides a schematic bird’s eye view of the city of Mecca, its surrounding hills, and the Haram, which is populated by white-robed pilgrims in their state of ritual purity. Angels inhabit the sky over the sanctuary. Text projects into the right-hand page: the margin speaks of cures for ailments which commonly affect travelers, such as gangrene of the feet,Footnote 44 while the text block discusses the formulae that pilgrims on Hajj must pronounce and the things that are forbidden to them in ehrām—sex, swearing, the recollection of sex in the presence of women, and “sin.” The painting is not an illustration of these concepts, but rather a visualization of the promise of what awaits the pilgrim who can overcome what they discuss: the perils of travel to Arabia on land and by sea; and the invalidation of pilgrimage through breaking ehrām. Footnote 45 It builds on both texts.
Figure 5. Add. MS. 27261 ff. 371b‒2a: A doctor treating his patient; tables on dream interpretation. © The British Library Board.
Similar processes are in play on f. 371b (Figure 5). The painting depicts a patient sitting up in a makeshift bed while a doctor feels his pulse. Behind the physician stands a serving girl holding a tray of poultices. The marginal text is part of a medical treatise which discusses how doctors should diagnose the sick, and how they should alter their treatment methods after observing their patients and taking their vital signs.Footnote 46 The text recognizes that the body must not be treated to the exclusion of the psyche: a doctor should inquire as to the patient’s sleep, so as to ensure that their brain is sound. Some patients also require their loved ones and intimates to stay with them in order to regain their strength. The text of the matn on the previous and facing pages provides diagnostic methods for interpreting dreams. One table states that patients should name the objects which they see in their dreams, and that the first letter of each object will determine whether the dreams are well- or ill-omened. Since it depicts a figure in bed, the image on f. 371b takes on a double significance: it is as relevant to the text on dream interpretation as it is to the treatise on medicine, emphasizing the convergence of psychic and physical approaches in the treatment of sickness.
Visual and Verbal Play: The Case of Rowzat al-Monajjemin
The text of the matn of the last ten folios of the anthology (ff. 533b‒543b) consists of the chapter on the forms of the constellations from Rowzat al-monajjemin (The Astronomers’ Garden), a work by the eleventh-century polymath Shahmardān ibn Abi l-Kheyr which deals with astronomy and astrology.Footnote 47 These pages are, for the most part, bordered by vignettes which at first glance seem to be discrete and randomly arranged. For example, the margin of f. 537b contains two separate monochrome scenes, one depicting a male figure out hawking on horseback for ducks, the other showing a jackal tearing into the stomach of a camel, a composition which recalls an episode from Kalīla wa-Dimna. Footnote 48 The margin of f. 538b contains images of a pair of lovers gazing at one another; Khosrow looking at the bathing Shirin; a stork; and two rams in combat. As these examples suggest, some of the vignettes featured throughout this section recall moments from well-known narratives, while others are thematically and technically reminiscent of near-contemporary preparatory sketches and single-page drawings.
It is possible that ff. 533b‒543b were not originally intended to be decorated in this fashion, because there is a breakdown in the arrangement of Rowzat al-monajjemin, and several folios are absent. This can be deduced from the fact that the northern constellations are incorrectly intermixed with the southern ones,Footnote 49 and several constellations are also missing.Footnote 50 There are further issues with the marginal text, Shabestari’s (d. 740/1340) Saʿādatnāmeh (The Book of Felicity), which breaks off at f. 553b, then reappears in the margin of f. 539b, then breaks off again, before finally trailing off without actually ending on f. 540b.Footnote 51 The confusion begins on f. 534a, where the margin has been left free of both text and image. If we follow the order of the constellations, f. 534 ought to be placed before f. 541, where the margin is also free of text and image. Assuming that the text-block was ruled and illuminated first, that the central text was copied next, that the marginal text was written out after that, and that the marginal paintings and drawings were executed last of all, it seems possible that the mix-up with the arrangement of the central text meant that it was not considered expedient to copy out the marginal text, and so the artist filled in the margins of this section with vignettes.
Figure 6. Add. MS. 27261 ff. 534b-5a: Astrological treatise; the four elements. © The British Library Board.
Although the decorated margins of ff. 533b‒543b may not have been part of the anthology’s original plan, we can still consider the artist’s approach to filling in the blank spaces. Contrary to prevailing scholarly opinion, the marginal images often do appear to engage with the themes of Rowzat al-monajjemin, in an oblique and playful way which is dependent on a close reading of the text as a whole. In some cases, the astrological import of the paintings and drawings is obvious. For example, the margins of ff. 534b‒535a, surrounding text which discusses the constellations of Canis Minor, Argo, Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, depict air, earth, fire and water, the four elements (tabāʾiʿ or arkān) from which Shahmardān ebn Abi l-Kheyr and the astrologers who preceded him claimed that life and the planetary bodies were constituted (Figure 6).Footnote 52 Each of the scenes is inhabited by a sampling of the beings associated with the given element: fire contains angels, birds inhabit the air, waterfowl, a turtle and a sea monster churn the water, and big cats roam the earth. Fire and air are depicted above water and earth, reflecting the idea that the former were “lighter” and the latter “heavier.”Footnote 53 The stars, the four elements and animal life were thought to be closely connected: like several of his predecessors, Shahmardān ebn Abi l-Kheyr contended that the natures of each species of living creature were determined by the influences of the constellations and the planetary bodies. For example, elephants, ducks, cranes and crocodiles were governed by the moon, while lions, wolves, leopards and birds of prey were to be associated with Mars.Footnote 54 The inclusion of animals on ff. 534b‒535a and more broadly throughout the marginalia of this section should not, therefore, strike us as random, but rather as a basic aspect of the study of cosmography, creation and the effects exerted by the heavenly bodies on life on earth.
In some cases, it is possible that the vignettes of animals and humans seen throughout this section also intersect obliquely with Shahmardān ebn Abi l-Kheyr’s prognostications concerning the events that come to pass under the influence of certain heavenly bodies. Kings go hunting when Saturn is in the twelfth house, and they behave towards the people with clemency and justice when it is in the eleventh house.Footnote 55 Cloven-hooved animals are in fine fettle when Mars is in the second house.Footnote 56 The images that we see in the margins of ff. 536b‒537b—showing flourishing animal life, a subject prostrate before a crowned ruler, and a princely figure out hunting—serve as visual exempla of the extent to which the heavenly bodies, which were moved in turn by God, supposedly dictated the natures of all humans and animals.
Figure 7. Add. MS. 27261 f. 533b: Astrological treatise; the descent of the moon in Mars. © The British Library Board.
Three sets of marginal images in this section of the manuscript may operate in a more ludic fashion than those examined thus far, each necessitating a close reading of the first text in the anthology—Nezāmi Ganjavi’s Khamseh, which makes considerable use of astrological themes in its poetic imagery. The marginalia of f. 533b depict two armies confronting one another at the top of the page; an angel holding a bridle in the right-hand margin; and, at the bottom, Bahrām Gur fighting a dragon, an episode drawn from Nezāmi’s Haft Peykar which is the subject of a painting earlier in the manuscript (Figure 7). The images on f. 533b can all be viewed as playful visual puns relating to aspects of astrology: the constellation Auriga is known as Mumsik al-aʿinna (“he who holds the reins”) in Arabic, which may help to elucidate the otherwise curious iconography of the angel carrying the bridle.Footnote 57 Bahrām is another name for the planet Mars,Footnote 58 the planet of war; the theme of warfare explains the battle going on at the top of the page.Footnote 59 The dragon represents the Moon’s descending node (al-dhanab, i.e. the tail [of the dragon]), which is famously ill-starred in astrology.Footnote 60 It is important to stress that the reading of Bahrām’s encounter with the dragon as a parallel for the conjunction of the moon’s descending node with Mars is not of the artist’s invention, since Nezāmi himself makes the astrological aspect of the episode a clear subtext in the Khamseh.Footnote 61 However, the fact that the artist picked up on this and chose to reference it here suggests that he was engaged in close study of the anthology’s texts, and that he expected the book’s readers to do the same in order to understand the joke.
Figure 8. ff. 538b‒9a: Astrological treatise. © The British Library Board.
The visual recollection of Khosrow o Shirin on f. 538b is based on a similarly detailed reading of astrological imagery in the text of the Khamseh (Figure 8). When relating how Khosrow came across Shirin bathing in a spring, Nezāmi compares his hero to “the sun, who had wandered from his course,” and his heroine to “the moon, whose place was in the Pleiades.”Footnote 62 Khosrow is unaware that this moon is destined to “descend in his constellation of the Zodiac (dar borj-e u).”Footnote 63 As she finishes bathing and arises from the water, Shirin is described as “the moon ascending in Aquarius,” causing Khosrow to rain tears,Footnote 64 the basic astrological concept being that when the moon rises in Aquarius it generates rainfall.Footnote 65 The artist’s visual recollection of the text at this point of the manuscript connects not narrative action, but poetic metaphor, with what was perceived to be scientific fact. This not only links different parts of the anthology together, but argues that literature can help to instruct the reader in scientific principles, and vice versa. We can therefore go further than the contention that
the decoration of the pages on which these scientific texts were written down also links them—by way of rich ornamental motifs, animals, dragons, Chinese-style bands and clouds, scenes from Nizami’s Khamsa and cartouches with Iskandar Sultan’s name, titles and lines of poetry—ostensibly to the other genres of knowledge and to Timurid courtly patronage for the arts.Footnote 66
Rather, the marginal decoration of ff.533b‒543b acts as a kind of visual analogy to Shahmardān ebn Abi l-Kheyr’s scientific text.
Figure 9. Detail of Dorn Reference Dorn1829 Pl. B (Image out of copyright).
The vignette recalling Leyli va Majnun on f. 539a is equally involved. In the top left-hand margin, Majnun kneels surrounded by a fawn and lions (Figure 8). A shadowy dog and hare run across the bottom of the page. These two seemingly separate episodes actually feature together in a single line of Nezāmi’s text. When describing how Majnun retreated to the desert and established harmony among the beasts, the poet adds, as an aside: “The dog made peace with the hare / The lioness suckled the fawn.”Footnote 67 The first of these two images can be interpreted as an astrological joke. The dog is the constellation Canis Major (Sirius), while the hare is the constellation Lepus. These two bodies are positioned next to one another in the heavens, and so the dog is often shown ceaselessly attempting to catch the hare in textual representations and on celestial globes (Figure 9).Footnote 68
The vignette of the dog and the hare in the margin of f. 539a mimics these kinds of representations, and it therefore performs at least three functions simultaneously: it is decorative; it is an evocation of two constellations; and it is a visual puzzle which can only be related to the other vignettes on the same page through a close reading of the Khamseh. Nezāmi’s text is particularly suited to being mined in this way because the poet integrates astrological imagery into the body of his narratives and engages in extensive descriptions of the constellations. An additional reason why the painter may have responded to this particular section of the text in the margin of f. 539a is that it is followed by a long and memorable passage, which extends to several pages in the print editions of the text, describing each constellation and planet visible to Majnun in the night sky.Footnote 69
The marginal images surveyed in this section cannot be considered illustrative or diagrammatic, yet they do engage with texts. Some of them are perhaps best described as analogical motifs which develop connections between Rowzat al-monajjemin and the Khamseh. They also allow the painter to reference levels of imagery in Nezāmi’s text which—while central to the experience of the Khamseh as it is read—would be difficult to represent in visual form without compromising our understanding of plot. This evidence brings into question the assumption that vignettes such as the scene of Majnun and the animals in the margin of f.538a are visual “interpolations,” inserted into the margins with the primary intention of subverting the viewer’s expectations of what they should see on the decorated page.Footnote 70 Instead, the reverse seems to be true: these images are designed to challenge the viewer to consider how an apparently random vignette should be integrated within the book’s program. While it is true that viewers are not obliged to read the text of the anthology, the primary aim of these marginal images is not to “promote, or reinforce, a habit of looking that did not require reading.”Footnote 71 They foster the viewer’s combination of the modes of close reading, memorization and looking. These are visual puns that depend, primarily, on an associative way of thinking which can link images with words.
Inventio and Experiment
I suggest that the pairings of text, marginal text and image studied in this paper both reflect critical ways of thinking and are designed to inculcate them in the viewer, and that they should be attributed to the careful design of the manuscript’s editors. By “editors,” I mean a group which may well have included the painter, the paper-ruler, the two calligraphers—Mohammad al-Halvāʾi and Nāser al-kāteb—as well as the literary and intellectual figures who manipulated the texts. Qevām al-Din Mohammad Yazdi’s (d. 830/1426 or 27) list of the notable men associated with Eskandar’s court includes figures such as the astronomer Ghiyās al-Din Jamshid b. Masʿud b. Mahmud Kāshi (d. 832/1429), who contributed the epistle Mokhtasar dar ʿelm-e heyʾat (A Compendium on the Science of Astronomy) to Add. MS. 27261,Footnote 72 as well as numerous physicians, musicians, artists and religious scholars.Footnote 73 Could a select group of Eskandar’s inner circle of boon companions (nodamāʾ), with their differing competencies and specialisms, have edited the volume collectively?
The research of intellectual historians has paved the way for us to explore the extent to which the sorts of visual and verbal puzzles which predominate in Add. MS. 27261 intersect with early fifteenth-century theoretical discussions of reading. As Melvin-Koushki shows, the lettrist thinker Sāʾen al-Din Torkeh, who compiled several books under Eskandar Soltān’s patronage and was affiliated with his court in Isfahan for a time, discusses critical frameworks in his epistle on Lettrism (Resāleh-ye horuf), which was written in 817/1414 in Shiraz.Footnote 74 In this treatise, Torkeh expounds a hermeneutic system in which differing interpretative systems apply to the different ranks of men; it is only Torkeh’s elite—prophets and lettrists themselves—who are capable of piercing through appearances and understanding essential meanings.Footnote 75 This can be understood as an approach to the critical analysis of visual experience. Similarly suggestive comments come in the introduction to Torkeh’s Persian commentary on Naẓm al-sulūk (The Poem of the Way, also known as Naẓm al-durr and al-ṭāʾiyya al-kubrā), the long mystical poem by Ibn al-Fāriḍ (d. 632/1235), where is it is essentially implied that visual experience is subjective, because people construct meaning out of stimuli in accordance with their abilities.Footnote 76
We should perhaps be cautious about seeing Torkeh’s highly abstracted and intellectualized framework—of which the above discussion is a simplification—as one that would have exerted a broad appeal outside purely scholarly networks in his own time. We should also remember that many of the texts in Add. MS. 27261 are commentaries and relatively simple introductions to different branches of knowledge, not necessarily the sort of texts designed for consumption by one of Torkeh’s “men of might and vision.”Footnote 77 Nevertheless, it is worth considering the notion that three functions of Add. MS. 27261 may have been to spur its readers to discover connections between things intuitively, to test ideas and think through their consequences, and to look beyond formal appearances to find underlying patterns. It is conventional among scholars to argue that the books produced for royal Timurid patrons projected their power, legitimized their rule, or instructed them in the elements of Persian culture. Add. MS. 27261 is more sophisticated: it offers the reader ways of experimenting with critical thought. The inventive potential of the book may be one reason why Eskandar Soltān had so many anthologies made for him. His other anthologies may strike us as similar to Add. MS. 27261 in their content, but it is possible that the juxtapositions which they create are very different. Variations in the relationships between central and marginal texts, the rate of illustration, and the presence or absence of marginal images would have all contributed to the creation of different juxtapositions, and therefore different dialogues, on each page.
Conclusion
This paper has aimed to emphasize two basic ideas. The first is the importance of pre-modern editors, a group of people whose role is virtually never discussed in modern scholarship on medieval Persian manuscript culture. Here I have advanced a strong model of editorship, in which the concerns of the book’s makers to manipulate old material to new effect was ultimately far more important than what any of the texts’ authors had meant to say. The second, linked, concept is that implicit frameworks for interpretation can be as sophisticated and complex as explicit analysis. The juxtaposition of material on the physical page offered one way for editors to guide readers to create meaning by looking and thinking, and to discover connections which altered the significance of what they saw. Add. MS. 27261 was a tightly controlled intellectual, literary and artistic project.
The author first presented the ideas developed in this article in a paper entitled “Sense and Sensibility: Iskandar Sultān’s London Anthology,” which was delivered as part of the seminar “On the Margin: Rethinking Commentary, Gloss and Marginalia,” organized by Matthew Keegan and Kelly Tuttle and held at the ACLA meeting in Seattle, WA, in March 2015; and subsequently in his Master's thesis, submitted to the University of Oxford in June 2015. The author would like to thank the readers at Iranian Studies for their comments on this article. Images of Add. MS. 27261 are reproduced here with the permission of the British Library.
ORCID
James White https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3385-6134
