Between the tenth and nineteenth centuries of the Common Era, Persian was used as a shared idiom of high culture across a great swathe of Eurasia. Like other languages, such as Classical Arabic, Classical Chinese, Koine Greek, and Sanskrit, it was co-opted as a medium of written communication by people who did not necessarily speak it as their mother tongue, but who employed it to construct a corpus of highly literate, allusive texts, which fostered intellectual dialogue over a large geographical zone. In the late medieval and early modern periods, when the so-called vernacular idioms – such as Pashto, Urdu and the Turkic languages – that were spoken in the regions where Persian was used began to be adopted for literary purposes themselves, they for their part often took the forms and topoi of Persian literary culture as models.

The spread of Persian and its interactions with other languages of written culture form the subject of The Persianate World. The volume presents twelve equally ground-breaking essays, which are designed to push the methodological and geographical boundaries of Persian studies, as well as the editor's wide-ranging introduction, which advances the case for “Persographia”, the phenomenon or domain of cosmopolitan written (as opposed to spoken) Persian. The volume's focus lies on the fifteenth to the very early twentieth centuries, a time-frame chosen because it represents “the maximal expansion then rapid contraction of one of history's most important languages of global exchange” (p. 1). The introduction and subsequent chapters cover an area extending from London to Beijing, and from Tobolsk to Galle.

As one might expect, given the fact that Turkic peoples played a key role in the diffusion of Persian, half of the chapters are devoted to interactions between Persian and Turkic; some of the most interesting perspectives are formed by the five essays which provide innovative evidence for linguistic interaction in the connected areas of the Volga basin, Central Asia, Xinjiang, and Siberia. The interest of these chapters lies in their presentation of little-known manuscripts and data from manuscript catalogues, and indeed it is remarkable how many of the essays throughout the volume double as manuscript surveys, a reminder of how much unstudied material exists. Due to the wealth of new information that they present, the chapters can be used comparatively, as introductions to the state of studies on, and the range of the sources available in, those geographical regions with which the reader is unfamiliar. Common themes emerge, not least the implication that previous scholarship may have underestimated the importance of provincial, even rural, locations in the production of Persian texts.

Both its scope and its pedagogical utility mean that The Persianate World is likely to shape discourse in the field for some time to come. For this very reason, it is worth playing devil's advocate and investigating some of the book's methodological issues. A lack of close, comparative reading is one of them. With the exception of chapter 2, which discusses differing interpretations of a line of verse by Ḥāfiẓ across the tradition, and chapter 12, which examines the epic poetry of Adīb Pīshāwarī with reference to its models, most of the essays shy away from the detailed analysis of connections between texts. This is not a minor point, as forms of intertextuality such as citation and emulation were the principal motor of what Green terms “Persographia”, and it is not happenstance that the period covered by this book is the time in which the Persian literary tradition becomes increasingly hard to understand if the reader does not pay attention to how authors engaged with their sources. A more philological focus on texts such as commentaries and super-commentaries, response poems, and supplements, across Persian and its contact languages, would therefore have been welcome.

Further objections could be raised to the deliberate decision to reduce the volume's focus on Iran. The editor's desire to steer the conversation away from the nationalist concept of Iran as Persian's natural and only significant home is justifiable, but would this idea not perhaps have been interrogated more directly by an exploration of linguistic diversity within Iran, a place where, today, a significant proportion of the population is bilingual – for example, with Turkic in the north-west and the north-east, Kurdish in the west, Arabic in pockets on the south coast, and Balochi in the east – and where, historically, Persian existed in competition and contact with several other languages of high culture, most particularly Arabic, but also Turkic? Multilingual Afghanistan, too, is strangely absent from this book, appearing only briefly in the introduction and chapter 12. This, despite the fact that it is, as the editor makes clear, generally sidelined in scholarship on the Persian-speaking world. Tajikistan, which normally receives short shrift in histories of Persian literature, and hence could be considered marginal, is also ignored.

The attempt to de-centre Persian studies when linguistic interactions in the centre remain understudied leads to another issue: the extent to which the roles of Persian in the different contexts studied here should be considered comparable. For example, does the highly proscribed use of Persian in Ming imperial edicts, studied in chapter 3, reflect the same processes as the creation of the literary network of Munīr Lāhūrī, studied in chapter 5? If a common mechanism underlies these two examples, the book does not bring it out explicitly, and as interesting as the epilogue is, it does not sift through the evidence provided in the foregoing chapters and give us a more granular idea of Persographia. Now that this volume has made the case for the domain of cosmopolitan written Persian, could the concept perhaps be refined, not on the basis of geography, but rather with other concerns in mind, such as genre, context of production, and reception? The frontiers of the Persianate world were, after all, dependent on the bearers of the culture and their intentions, rather than on any fixed point in space.