Flirting with the Radical: Intertextuality, Intervisuality, and Gendered Subversions in Manuscripts of Sūz u Gudāz

This essay focuses on a corpus of eight mid- to late eleventh-/seventeenth-century illustrated manuscripts of the poem Sūz u Gudāz by the poet Nawʿī (d. c. 1019/1610). The text describes the struggle of a Hindu maiden, whose fiancé has died, to commit satī on his funeral pyre despite the interventions of various figures in her life. The essay discusses how later Safavid painters adapted and transformed established pictorial compositions associated with mas̱navīs from the Khamseh (“Quintet”) of Neẓāmī to illustrate Nawʿī’s poem, reflecting its status as a javāb (pointed response) to Neẓāmīan romances. The illustrators often altered the compositional models to draw attention to the gendered dimensions of Nawʿī’s subversive poetics.

The Dragon in the West

The book describes the evolution of the modern dragon from its ancient forebears, in terms both of its form and of its narrative contexts. In physical form dragons are broadly serpentine, but have animalian heads, thick central bodies, wings, and clawed legs. In their stories they live in caves, lie on treasure, maraud, and burn; they are extraordinarily powerful, but even so ultimately worsted in their battles with humans. Despite the inestimable success of this physical form and this broad story-type, there is nothing obvious, inevitable, or natural about them. Rather, both are mature, complex, and artificial constructs. The book traces the evolution of the dragon’s form from the purely serpentine drakon of classical antiquity, through its merging with the forms of the ancient sea monster and the winged, humanoid demon, into that of the first recognizably modern dragon, the two-legged wyvern that emerged in the illustrated manuscripts of the ninth century AD, which has previously been described as the ‘Romanesque’ or ‘Gothic’ dragon. It traces the evolution of the dragon’s typical story-type again from classical antiquity, across the vast tradition of medieval hagiography (saints’ lives), and into the Germanic world, where particular attention is given to the wealth of dragons featured in the Norse sagas.

Illustrated Manuscripts of the Septuagint

The chapter provides a brief overview of illustrated Greek manuscripts of the Bible, starting from Late Antiquity until the end of the Byzantine Empire. It outlines different, often conflicting, hypotheses on the origins, development, and transmission of the illustrative cycles in Byzantine Bibles. The material is organized according to the diverse biblical textual units preserved in illustrated Byzantine manuscripts. The chapter traces connections between codices, and continuity in the use of pictorial vocabulary. At the same time, it flags diverse approaches to illustrating the biblical text, from literal illustrations through to highly symbolic visual exegesis.