Love and Devotion: From Persia and Beyond Review
Love and Devotion: From Persia and Beyond (Bodleian Library) is a curated journey through Persian manuscript culture and its transmission into wider Eurasia. It shows how poetry, calligraphy, and illumination carried ideas of love, ethics, and kingship across languages and courts.
Overview
Exhibition essays and catalog entries present key works—Shahnameh, Khamsa, lyrical divans—alongside codicology, patronage, and workshop practice. High-quality reproductions foreground script, pigments, and page design.
Summary
Sections trace themes: epic and romance; Sufi allegory; royal commissions; translation and adaptation in Ottoman, Mughal, and European contexts. Material analysis (paper, binding, gold) sits with iconography and marginalia, revealing books as social objects and diplomatic gifts.
Authors
Bodleian curators and scholars contribute accessible, well-footnoted essays rooted in collections expertise.
Key Themes
Text–image unity; love as ethical pedagogy; mobility of styles across empires; manuscript as luxury technology and network node.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths: superb images, clear context, and attention to making. Weaknesses: limited deep philology and workshop micro-history beyond highlights.
Target Audience
Readers of Islamic art, book historians, designers inspired by page architectures, and museum-goers.
Favorite Ideas
Calligraphy as architecture of meaning; marginal glosses as living dialogue; diplomatic albums bridging courts.
Takeaways
Persian manuscripts are systems: poetry, script, pigment, and patronage co-produce meaning. Follow the book as object to see cultural exchange in motion.
