For the 4th Persian Manuscripts Association (PMA) talk in 2025, Dr Theodore Beers will explore the phenomenon of particularly early and noteworthy manuscripts of Naṣrallāh Munshī’s Persian Kalīla va Dimna. This lecture builds on PMA’s ongoing commitment to uncovering the material history of Persian prose by examining a set of texts whose very survival challenges our assumptions about manuscript transmission in the premodern Islamic world.

Theodore Beers (PhD, University of Chicago, 2020) is a historian of classical Persian literature, with particular interests in premodern literary exchange between Persian and Arabic, and in the development of digital corpora and tools to strengthen the study of these traditions. He is currently based at Drexel University in Philadelphia as a research software engineer, and he also maintains an affiliation with the Kalīla and Dimna Project at the Freie Universität Berlin.

This presentation will focus on early manuscripts of the Persian version of Kalīla and Dimna — a book of (mostly) animal fables that is a classic of premodern world literature—by Naṣrallāh Munshī, written at the Ghaznavid court ca. 540/1145–46. Naṣrallāh’s text is considered one of the foundational works of classical Persian prose literature. Among its noteworthy characteristics is that a few very early manuscript copies have survived, the oldest of which is dated 551/1156. In fact, although this Persian Kalīla and Dimna is based on the Arabic version attributed to Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ (ca. 750 CE), the very earliest extant copies of the Arabic are more recent, from the seventh/thirteenth century! The talk will discuss the curious phenomenon of the well-preserved codicology of Naṣrallāh Munshī’s work, showing example pages from three or four early manuscripts (as time permits).

Unsurprisingly, these Persian manuscripts from the sixth/twelfth and seventh/thirteenth century have interesting features of their own, in terms of orthography, calligraphic style, text layout, and more.

17 April 2025, 5 – 7 pm BST
Register on Zoom:
https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/hbT3R1UrQnWzrZ5T-Rd-bQ