Untold stories of Maghribī Qurʾans (12th-14th centuries)

Dr Umberto Bongianino
Tuesday, 18 May 2021
Seminar

This talk will shed some new light on the rich, yet often overlooked tradition of Quranic calligraphy and illumination of the Islamic West. The specificities and context of production of some little-known Maghribī Qurʾans will be discussed as a means of unveiling the values and concerns of the people who made, owned, and endowed them. Like no other artifacts, these precious codices can be regarded as a synthesis of scholarship, aesthetic thinking, and socio-political claims peculiar to the medieval Maghrib and al-Andalus, and can provide us with a new perspective on the cultural history of these regions.

Umberto Bongianino is Departmental Lecturer in Islamic Art and Architecture at the Khalili Research Centre, University of Oxford, and a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC-funded project Documenting Multiculturalism: Coexistence, Law and Multiculturalism in the Administrative and Legal Documents of Norman and Hohenstaufen Sicily. He is currently writing a book on Maghribi calligraphy and the manuscript tradition of the Islamic West.

To join the seminar please register.