The City As Anthology : Eroticism and Urbanity in Early Modern Isfahan

Household anthologies of seventeenth-century Isfahan collected everyday texts and objects, from portraits, letters, and poems to marriage contracts and talismans. With these family collections, Kathryn Babayan tells a new history of the city at the transformative moment it became a cosmopolitan center of imperial rule. Bringing into view people's lives from a city with no extant state or civic archives, Babayan reimagines the archive of anthologies to recover how residents shaped their communities and crafted their urban, religious, and sexual selves. Babayan highlights eight residents-from king to widow, painter to religious scholar, poet to bureaucrat-who anthologized their city, writing their engagements with friends and family, divulging the many dimensions of the social, cultural, and religious spheres of life in Isfahan. Through them, we see the gestures, manners, and sensibilities of a shared culture that configured their relations and negotiated the lines between friendship and eroticism. These entangled acts of seeing and reading, desiring and writing converge to fashion the refined urban self through the sensual and the sexual-and give us a new and enticing view of the city of Isfahan. "This book offers an exploration of Isfahan through the lens of seventeenth-century anthologies, referred to in Persian as majmu'a and muraqqa', literally a "gathering together" or "patch-work." Thousands of these visual and literary anthologies assembled everyday texts and objects, ranging from portraits, letters from friends, and poems depicting public spaces to marriage contracts and talismans. An urban medium of communication, the anthology was a new kind of book--and one, Babayan argues, that can be read as a collection of city life and an artifact of urbanization. The seventeenth century was a key period in Isfahan, as the city was becoming a cosmopolitan center of imperial rule and global trade. This transformative moment provides a unique context from which to investigate the crafting of urban, religious, and sexual selves and communities, and the anthologies a unique source to bring people's lives into view for a city with no extant state or city archives"-- Provided by publisher Cover 1 Contents 8 List of Maps and Illustrations 10 Acknowledgments 12 Note on Transliteration 18 Introduction: The Adab of Urbanity 22 1 Imperial Visions of Sovereignty 51 2 Collecting, Self- Fashioning, and Community 84 3 Disturbing the City 129 4 Cultivating and Disciplining Friendship Letters 158 5 Family Archives and Female Spaces of Intimacy 185 Conclusion: The Erotics of Urbanity 217 Appendix 228 Notes 230 Bibliography 258 Index 270 A 270 B 271 C 272 D 272 E 272 F 272 G 273 H 273 I 274 J 274 K 274 L 275 M 275 N 277 O 277 P 277 Q 278 R 278 S 278 T 280 U 280 V 280 W 280 Y 281 Z 281