Manuscript Matters and the Persian Arts of the Book in Early Modern Times

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).

• Introduction: Persian manuscripts and the arts of the bookChapter 1: Persian Paintings as Prelude and PostscriptChapter 2: Manuscript Minutia: Page Markers and Why They MatterChapter 3: Masters of the Minute: Illuminators, Signatures and StylesChapter 4: Picturing the Persianate Book