ABSTRACT
This study has as its centerpiece the only surviving manuscript copy of the thirteenthcentury version1 of the (Vat. Ar. Ris. 386; hereafter, BR); A tale of love with happy ending highly unusual for the slave-girl story on which it is almost certainly based, BR has formed part of the collection of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana since AD 1535, and quite possibly earlier.2 It is an unicum in terms of both its text and its program of images; it is also an unicum in that it is the only surviving illuminated manuscript dealing with secular topics-in this case, “courtly” and “uncourtly” love treated as part of a sustained narrative-to have been almost certainly produced in al-Andalus, almost certainly during the first third of the thirteenth century.3 The “almosts” appear here as caveats because the thirty paper folios and fourteen illustrations which today remain of BR are incomplete;4 the manuscript is missing both beginning and end folios and we must thus, in the end, remain ignorant, not only of just how the Old Woman managed to wangle her way into the majlis5 in the first place, but also of any information the object might originally have contained concerning either patrons or provenance.6
