Le livre des merveilles

摘要

IN OCCUPIED PARIS, A PROPOSAL TO PUBLISH A LARGE COLOR VOLUME devoted to a single, little-known Persian manuscript could easily have been dismissed as a great expense of unclear consequence. Yet this is not what happened. Henri Massé's Le livre des merveilles du monde appeared in 1944. The volume consisted of a fifteen-page introduction to the Bibliothèque Nationale's manuscript persan 332, followed by twenty plates reproducing in color a selection of full folios from the manuscript. The thick paper and large-format pages had clearly not been chosen primarily for affordability. The first time I pulled the volume from the Fine Arts Library stacks in the late 1990s, librarian András Riedlmayer recounted to me Oleg Grabar's explanation of its printing in Paris in 1944: its publication had been undertaken as an act of cultural resistance. If so, it was also an act that demonstrated a commitment to furthering knowledge among future generations in as yet unknown ways. In this sense, the commitment to keep publishing in a time of crisis had paralleled the critical commitment research libraries must maintain to keep building collections in challenging times. Here I was, an American student more than fifty years later, starting to investigate the genre to which BnF manuscript persan 332 belongs: medieval Islamic illustrated manuscripts that are encyclopedias of the wonders of creation. The images reproduced in Massé's volume were quite different from the few other images from the genre that were available to me in scattered publications, and so gave me an initial inkling of the genre's diversity. In the end it turned out to be the diversity of the genre that made it a topic rich enough for a dissertation and then for a book. The Fine Arts Library's rich and accessible collections, as well as the treasure of its knowledgeable and helpful librarians, allowed me to begin my primary research even before I embarked on an extended odyssey to distant manuscript libraries