A reappraisal of succulent plant illustrations in early manuscripts 512 CE to the fifteenth century

The story of Mulian rescuing his mother’s soul from hell was featured in numerous pictorial versions of different formats in China. They could take the form of multi-scene handscrolls, illustrations in manuscripts and editions, and separate scenes in devotional religious art objects such as murals and reliefs. The Mulian subject was of primary importance in the popularization of Buddhist ideas among different layers of society. The earliest extant pictorial versions of this story in China (tenth century) were related to Buddhist storytelling with the use of visual devices. Illustrations appeared in several written versions of the Mulian story that were circulated among different layers of society in China in the twelfth through fifteenth centuries. These illustrated versions showed different degrees of elaboration, spread among common folk and the imperial courts of the Yuan and Ming dynasties. In this article I explore the functions of the narrative illustrations of the Mulian story in various social contexts. These functions were quite varied in case of most art objects analyzed here: pictures in woodblock editions and manuscripts augmented the textual part and also made them appealing to the lay readers.

Reviewed by: Art, Allegory and the Rise of Shiism in Iran, 1487–1565 by Chad Kia Mary Yoshinari (bio) Keywords Sufi, Shiism, Persianate, Iran, Safavid, Timurid, Ilkhanid, Islamic, painting, poetry Review of Chad Kia, Art, Allegory and the Rise of Shiism in Iran, 1487–1565. Edinburgh University Press, 2019. 304 pages (291 + x pages). $105.00 Hardback, $44.95 Paperback. Evincing extensive research, Chad Kia's notes and bibliography constitute more than a third of Art, Allegory and the Rise of Shiism in Iran, 1487–1565. Conversely, his arguments are based on an analysis of twelve paintings, mostly from the late fifteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries. In the introduction, he asserts that Sufism was sublimated to an increasingly orthodox version of Iranian Shiism. Thus, his main aim "is to uncover the genesis, development and significance" of "an extraordinary trend in the history of Islamic art" circa 1487, one that also highlights "a neglected function of pictorial arts in the Persianate world" (6). According to Kia, the locus of this groundbreaking stylistic turn in late Timurid Herat is a series of understudied enigmatic figures from didactic Sufi allegories. Derived from "stock images, metaphors and parables" of twelfthcentury Persian Sufi poetry, these "tropes" (e.g., spinning thread) were emblematic of "moral qualities and virtues adhered to and advocated by mystical, [End Page 124] trade-guild, and other contemporary popular associations" (9). Further, he asserts that the decisive catalyst for "this iconographical innovation" was "the powerful impulse towards esotericism that dominated Persianate societies of the fifteenth century," one often expressed in poetic literary form while also spurring "many other religious innovations of the period" (11–12). Apart from this new artistic style's complex origins, Kia is perhaps even more fascinated by its persistence in Safavid Iran within the context of the transregional spiritual zeitgeist: The introduction of new figures into the iconography of Persianate painting, when considered in connection with the success across the Iranian plateau of Imami Shiism, will reveal their shared origins. Each … stems from the same socio-cultural developments in a fifteenth-century world dominated by varying intensities of esoteric beliefs in reincarnation, the transmigration of souls and in a leader invested with divine attributes. Whether it was the influence of Naqshbandi Sufi ideas in Timurid Herat, or the association of the Turkmen tribes of eastern Anatolia with the Safavid order in Ardebil, this was a period marked by heterodoxy, otherworldly beliefs, millenarian movements and "extremism." (13) Ideally, Kia could have explained how the Safavid genealogy was intertwined with the Sufism of Sheik Safi al-Din Ardabili, the namesake of their dynasty, somewhat earlier. Moreover, his use of the prefix "pseudo-Islamic" for the Sufi popular religious organisations is problematic (13). That being said, Kia clearly and systematically advances his thesis in the ensuing five chapters of Art, Allegory and the Rise of Shiism. For instance, in chapter one, he presents a convincing argument for the historical context that led to the emergence of these cryptic images: "the discovery of hidden patterns as a pleasurable aesthetic and intellectual pursuit" among the elites and literati of Husayn Bayqara's court in Herat. Furthermore, he stresses that "the most pre-eminent Sufi poet" Abd al-Rahman Jami was the bridge of "mystical signification" between late Timurid Herat and early Safavid Iran (21–22). He also is highly critical of the perceived disconnect between the academic study of Persianate painting and Persian poetry: Mysticism—or the ascetic-mystical mode of piety in Islam known as Sufism—so overwhelmed this most privileged of all Persian cultural [End Page 125] productions that virtually any poem composed after the thirteenth century could be argued to harbour some mystical content, especially if composed during the so-called "classical" period of Persian poetry … Considering the predominance of mysticism as the principal form of piety in the Persianate world—especially after the thirteenth-century Mongol conquest—and the fact that some works like the poetry of Rumi and Hafiz came virtually to acquire sacred authority, the near-total avoidance of informed engagement with the subject in scholarly studies of Persianate painting is remarkable, even baffling. (24) Kia subsequently delves into an analysis of four manuscript illustrations from Farid...

In the study of Persian miniature painting and its development through the fifteenth century, it is dif ficult to overestimate the importance of the illustra tions in the 1487 manuscript of the Mantiq al-tayr in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.1 Three of the illustrations in this manuscript are among the earliest specimens of the style of painting ush ered in by the artists at the famed atelier of Sultan Husayn Bayqara, the last Timurid prince in Herat.2 Over the years, aside from the usual debates about attribution, these enigmatic paintings have enticed art historians' curiosity and generated a number of largely inconclusive interpretations. general tendency to explain their content symbolically is ostensibly due to the designation of the Mantiq al-tayr as mystical poetry. Translated into English under such titles as Speech of the Birds or Conference of the Birds, the Mantiq al-tayr was written by Farid al-Din cAttar in rhyming couplets some three centuries before this manuscript was copied and illustrated.3 'Attar's twelfth century work was indeed an explicit contribution to the discourse of Sufism, which like its counterparts in Jewish Kabala and medieval Christian mysticism, sought a direct, individual experience of God. Advo cating the pursuit of the real?as opposed to the phe nomenal?truth, 'Attar's work is an allegorical tale presenting the various stages that a seeker of truth must go through in his or her quest for unity with the divine. paintings in the Metropolitan Museum manuscript have for the most part been understood as literal depictions of events from a handful of 'Attar's numerous parables, which elaborate the importance of these stages on the path to Sufism. Of the eight illustrations in the Metropolitan Museum manuscript, the first four are early seventeenth-cen tury additions. Of the four original illustrations, one does not display the characteristics that distinguish the other three paintings as early examples of the new style. Rather, this fourth painting, The Beggar before the King, has been characterized as depict ing a scene, which has been an integral part of the art of Iran from the Sasanid dynasty onward and appears in all schools of all periods of Persian miniature painting.4 My concern here is with The Man Drowning,5 one of the other three fif teenth-century illustrations, which are stylistically sim ilar enough to one another to be attributed to the same artist or group of artists. According to Priscilla Soucek, the advice given to students of calligraphy by Qazi Ahmad in the sixteenth century reveals the conservatism of artistic education in Iran, which jus tified two basic mechanisms of continuity in manu script illustration: literal reproduction and selective adaptation.6 Taking into account this tradition-bound artistic practice, I have assumed the content of the Bearded Man Drowning, and, except for the court scene, of all the paintings original to the manuscript, to have been provided by 'Attar's text. Nevertheless, although all three adhere to the convention of depict ing the events of the accompanying text, half of each of these three paintings contains images that do not appear to bear any direct link to that text?at least not on the literal level.

The paper argues that the architecture and the sculpture of the mid-12th century entry buildings can be understood in relation to the revival of jurisprudence at the same period. Models for the architecture are suggested in France and Italy associated with the study of law, and for the sculpture to illustrations in early law manuscripts originating in these centres. Impetus for the revival came most likely from Archbishop Theobald and from the curia assembled by him which included prominent legal scholars from Italy.

Petrarch didn’t illustrate his Rvf autograph manuscript, but there are some fifteenth century Rvf manuscripts illuminated with an enough complex and varied strategy of illustrating. We felt that it might be of interest to reflect on the Petrarch’s choice of not illuminating his lyric book and to analyse painted illustrations in some Rvf manuscripts to enlighten their visual semantic.

Chaucer Abroad, Chaucer at Home:

How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time and Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches

Chaucer’s Sir Thopas has always been read in terms of its forms: the tail-rhyme that creates the poem’s laughable music, the affiliation with romance that grounds its parody in the forms we call genre. Nor are these forms of Sir Thopas inconsequential. Christopher Cannon has recently argued that it was precisely in the forms of romance that textual objects in the thirteenth century rose above the vagaries of matter and became literary essence: through King Horn, Havelok the Dane, and the other texts that Sir Thopas spoofs, “the spirit of English romance became the spirit of English literature.”1 But if Chaucer registers this apotheosis of the literary through a knowing de-materialization of his own text, Cannon’s study of early Middle English literature asks us to return to the matter that grounds that spirit. Similarly, the material forms of Sir Thopas raise questions about how to understand the poem’s essence—that is to say, how the tail-rhyme meter or the layout of a manuscript page might be invested with literary significance. In different ways, both New Criticism and textual materialism have made it commonplace to assert that form shapes meaning, but I am equally interested here in the ways in which it fails to do so. For the material forms of Sir Thopas, specifically its manuscript layout, bear a problematic relation to its immaterial

Cambridge, University Library, MS. Gg.4.27, brings together more of Geoffrey Chaucer's work than any other extant manuscript. It contains Troilus and Criseyde, The Canterbury Tales, Legend of Good Women, Parliament of Fowls, and other poems. MS. Gg.4.27 is also important for its unique spellings, its organization, and its value as a corpus. Based on my examination of the manuscript, I argue that MS. Gg.4.27 is the earliest surviving effort to create a corpus of Chaucer's poetry and that the manuscript and its production provide important information about the reception of Chaucer in the fifteenth century. As there are no manuscripts of Chaucer's works that have been dated to his lifetime, we are largely dependent upon the fifteenth-century reception of Chaucer for what we know and read. The basis for understanding the reception of Chaucer's work in the fifteenth century, therefore, must be the early manuscripts in which it is contained, and the most useful of these is MS. Gg.4.27 because of the complexity of its production and the scope of its contents. A codicological study of MS. Gg.4.27 illustrates how the early fifteenth century created a narrative of Chaucer. MS. Gg.4.27 is mutilated; portions of leaves and even entire leaves are missing. However, MS. Gg.4.27 was a lavish manuscript produced in East Anglia. Multiple hands and artists who exhibit East Anglian characteristics were involved in the project and indicate possible points of origin. Producing such a corpus would have involved significant time and money for the collecting of exemplars, for laying out the codex, and for editing the individual works. These features become singular evidence about how the early fifteenth century constructed Chaucer, the poet. Finally, the construction itself is contextualized to explore the possibility that this perspective of Chaucer was created in response to the growing interest in the English language during the early fifteenth century.

Despite the shoreless output of scholarly publications on the Thousand and One Nights in general, research on the textual history is comparatively limited. Given the small number of early Arabic manuscripts, evidence from early translations is crucial for any reconstruction of the Mamluk version of the Thousand and One Nights, written approximately between 1425 and 1500 CE. For some time, the existence of an early Turkish translation, extant in two manuscripts and dated to the fifteenth century CE on linguistic grounds, has been known. The two manuscripts cover the first 56 nights of the work. A later Turkish version, written in the seventeenth century CE, extant in a nine volume manuscript, has been known for a long time too. In this contribution, the discovery of further parts of the oldest Turkish translation is indicated for the first time. Text samples are edited, translated and compared to the oldest Arabic version of the Thousand and One Nights. A collation with the nine volume manuscript has shown that parts of it contain the earlier translation of the fifteenth century. Furthermore, some Turkish versions of single stories also belonging to the Thousand and One Nights are discussed. Among these are the story of the Queen of the serpents (Cāmaspnāme) and the story of Sayf al-Mulūk. Based on the new evidence from Turkish manuscripts and their numbering of the nights, an overall view on the puzzle of fragments is given. The same is done for the early Arabic manuscripts. As a result, it has turned out that both groups show the same sequence of stories. There are inserted stories, but no reversed order of stories is found. This suggests that a stable tradition of the overall structure of the work existed. Finally, the contribution contains an inventory of 62 Turkish manuscripts of the Thousand and One Nights and of single stories.

The East Norse rhymed chronicles form a literary complex of historical, political, and literary texts. They can be split in two groups, one wherein the time span dealt with is restricted to events recent to their composition, and another beginning in legendary times. Among the former the Old Swedish Erikskrönikan (Chronicle of Duke Erik), probably written in the 1320s, stands out as the older, and as a significant literary and historical source. It is the first preserved major contribution to Swedish historiography. Erikskrönikan is preserved in nineteen manuscripts from the fifteenth century onward. Together with Förbindelsedikten (Connecting Composition), Karlskrönikan (Chronicle of Karl), and Sturekrönikan (Chronicle of Sture), it presents Swedish history from 1230 to 1496. A disputed Engelbrektskrönika might be preserved as the first part of Karlskrönikan, contributing to making this by far the largest of the East Norse rhymed chronicles, with 9,628 verses. Karlskrönikan survives in an early manuscript (from c. 1452) and in later copies, the short Förbindelsedikten (632 verses) covers the period between Erikskrönikan and Karlskrönikan, and is a later supplement in some manuscripts. Sturekrönikan consists of two sections with partly contradictious ideals, but this is disguised in the surviving ten manuscripts (the oldest of which is from c. 1500). The texts of the latter group are less important as sources to historical events. Moreover, these texts—the Old Swedish Lilla rimkrönikan (Smaller Rhymed Chronicle), Yngsta rimkrönikan (Younger Rhymed Chronicle), and the Old Danish Rimkrønike (Rhymed Chronicle)—share a monologic form, in which former kings reflect on their lives, vices, and virtues, clearly making these texts useful as moral-didactic exempla. Lilla rimkrönikan survives in several manuscripts, the oldest dated of these is from 1457. The oldest text witness of the Old Danish Rimkrøniken is a fragment from the middle of the fifteenth century, the first complete version is an incunable from 1495, and the text also survives in a Middle Low German translation. All the rhymed chronicles are politically biased and they propagate courtly values and aristocratic or royal politics. The Swedish texts often display a harsh anti-Danish sentiment; in the only Old Danish text that is turned around. Knittel (doggerel verse) is the predominant, and apart from stanzaic divisions of the Old Danish text, almost the only type of versification. The titles are modern designations; they have however, become standard. The compound term (Sw. rimkrönika, Da. rimkrønike) is not attested before the beginning of the seventeenth century. The genre had a post-medieval bloom in the sixteenth century.

The number of manuscripts and printed books which are recognised as having served as exemplars in printing houses in the fifteenth century is very small when compared with the recorded output of incunable printing. The investigations of some of these instances have highlighted the value of such documents as unique resources for insight into printing-house practices. At the most ambitious editorial level, the task of the corrector was occasionally facilitated by having a manuscript copied for him with the express purpose of serving as the basis for his editorial annotations. Early manuscripts were often treated with greater care than the 'printing-house manuscripts. The development of interest in printer's copy can be seen in the context of the rapidly increasing interest in book history in general, which began in the late 1950s. The transition to two-pull presses took place gradually in Italy from the early 1470s.Keywords: corrector; manuscripts; printed books; printer's copy; printing-house; two-pull presses

Reviewed by: Agnelli Ravennatis: Liber Pontificalis Ecclesiae Ravennatis Leslie Brubaker and Chris Wickham Agnelli Ravennatis: Liber Pontificalis Ecclesiae Ravennatis. Edited and annotated by Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis. [Corpus Christianorum: Continuatio Mediaevalis, 199.] (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers. 2006. Pp. 393. €175,00.) Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis has been working on a re-edition of Agnellus' ninth-century history of the bishops of Ravenna for more than fifteen years and has already published a translation of it (Agnellus of Ravenna, The book of pontiffs of the church of Ravenna [Washington, D.C., 2004]); in this new book she gives us the Latin text in the prestigious "Corpus Christianorum" series. The bulk of Agnellus has a fairly straightforward manuscript tradition, based on two manuscripts, one fifteenth century and one sixteenth; only two of the bishops' lives, Severus and Peter Chrysologus (fourth-and fifth-century bishops respectively), have a more complex textual tradition. The text was completely edited by Holder-Egger for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in 1878 (and incompletely edited by Testi-Rasponi for the never-as-satisfactory Rerum Italicarum Scriptores series in 1924); it is not among the early medieval texts that desperately need a new edition. But Deliyannis has produced a greatly improved version of Holder-Egger's text, thanks above all to her careful work on the manuscripts for the lives of Severus and Peter, which has allowed her to second-guess her earliest manuscript in ways that Holder-Egger could not. She amends its grammar and orthography consistently; but we found it very helpful, and anyway, her extremely full textual apparatus (with notes and text citations at the end) makes it easy to tell what she has done. This edition is presently definitive and may remain so as long as Holder-Egger's did. Deliyannis's introduction, in English, comes down firmly, and helpfully, for a date for Agnellus's composition in the 830s–840s, and she can date individual sections more tightly than that (pp. 11–19). She then discusses Agnellus's [End Page 330] sources, which were quite extensive and even included documents (a list is supplied on pp. 47–48), and, famously, inscriptions in churches and buildings (hardly discussed in the introduction,however). Then in forty dense and carefully argued pages she describes the manuscripts and defends her editorial procedures. Two appendices follow, one on episcopal datings and one listing Agnellus' references to churches and other buildings in Ravenna. This is a fairly stern introduction. For more on Ravenna itself, readers will have to turn to the Storia di Ravenna, edited by Antonio Carile (2 vols.,Venice, 1992); for more on Agnellus, to J.M.Pizarro, Writing Ravenna (Ann Arbor, MI, 1995),and to Deliyannis's own translation. Agnellus is a very strange author, with an unusually arcane vocabulary and a set of unique political and historical positions; it cannot be said that he is fully understood yet. But with this edition, we have the raw material for such a study, and we can be very grateful for it. [End Page 331] Leslie Brubaker University of Birmingham Chris Wickham All Souls College, University of Oxford Copyright © 2008 The Catholic University of America Press

De Die Natali is an obscure little treatise on human life, the influence of the planets and the divisions of time, written by the Roman grammarian Censorinus and dedicated to Q. Caerellius for his forty-ninth birthday in A.D. 238. It was not a very popular work before the fifteenth century, and there is no reason why it should have been. Even its Italian revival was probably due to its brevity, which encouraged its copying as an adjunct to the larger, more interesting works which accompanied it in the earliest manuscripts. The increasing popularity of astrology may also have influenced its dissemination during the Renaissance. It was not, however, completely lost from sight during Europe’s first millennium. The study of its early transmission and use throws some interesting light upon the revival of classical literature in that period, though it is unlikely to improve the state in which the text has come down to us.

The principle on which collections such as Aesop’s Fables and their medieval progeny is founded is that by examining animals behaving like people, often badly, some aspects of human behavior can be called into question and ameliorated. Generally these are not domestic animals, but more usually wild ones: foxes, crows, wolves, and the like. A few fables do portray domestic animals, such as the story in which mice or rats bell a cat. But oddly, one of the most ubiquitous of domestic animals, the dog, is not chief among the actors in fables. Yet the dog has a long and illustrious history in medieval culture as a model for human behavior to be avoided or emulated. This chapter examines a number of instances in which medieval miniature painters used familiar dogs in interior scenes to serve as counterpoint to or heighten certain human traits, both desirable and undesirable, in courtly manuscript painting.In trying to understand the significance of dogs in courtly medieval manuscript illustration, it is vital to look at context. In a complex triptych for example, a dog can on one wing be a tormentor of Christ and on the other symbolize loyalty. This chapter explores some of the different contexts for the dog in medieval art with a focus on its symbolism of civility and loyalty in courtly domestic interior scenes. The focus is primarily on Flemish manuscript painting of the later fifteenth century, but includes the appearance of the dog in medieval calendars as well to show how it comes to occupy such an important place in interior spaces and how, with the rise of Flemish realism, it goes along with plate, textiles such as bedding and hangings, and other things to affirm the values of the class for which the manuscripts were commissioned.