ABSTRACT
In the last twenty years there has been a great upsurge of interest in Safavid Iran, stemming at least in part from the programme of Safavid conferences every four years, beginning with the Round Table in Paris in 1989. 1 Many meetings have been convened since then, proceedings and monographs published, exhibitions mounted and catalogued. Before that time, there was little work available in the Anglophone world beyond the numerous contributions of Roger Savory, culminating in his Iran under the Safavids (Cambridge, 1980). This included only a brief section on the pictorial arts, although in an article published in 1975 he did discuss more fully the involvement of the Qizilbash in intellectual pursuits. 2 In this contribution, I aim to re-examine a particular aspect of Safavid book production and look more closely at some of the historical literature of the period and its illustration, a question that has received insufficient attention in the past, and which I hope will be welcomed both by our dedicatee and by other colleagues working in this field.
