Anthologizing the City of Isfahan: Family Archives and Urban Knowledge, lecture by Professor Kathryn Babayan

Seventeenth century Isfahan witnessed a craze in the composition of a new kind of book, the majmuʿa, or anthology. Curated and written in the domestic sphere of the household, anthologies archive city-writings once in circulation; they illustrate the practices of urban knowledge and their valorization by communities who took possession of them. The imaginations that anthologizing generated, and the choices behind the gathering, excerpting, recording, and ordering of texts bound in a manuscript, represent different techniques of interpreting the city: they reveal a place where, among other things, the refined self was crafted on paper and performed in public.Anthologizing the City of Isfahan Family Archives and Urban Knowledge (1)