Interview with a Fellow: Illustrating History

Professor Charles Melville has been a Fellow at Pembroke since 1985, and is currently Professor of Persian history.

In a two-part series he discusses his work with illustrated manuscripts, in which he explores the ways that history is written, visualised, and transmitted through time.

The illustration of Persian manuscripts is the subject of the Shahnama Project, a comprehensive collection of the manuscripts of the Shahnama, the Persian epic ‘Book of Kings’. The project has been directed by Professor Melville since its inception in 1999, and aims to stimulate research on the Shahnama. The literary epic includes thousands of verses, and is the popular story of Iran’s mythical past. With hundreds of illustrated manuscripts, the effort of collecting them is already significant. The next step is to investigate how and why the manuscripts are illustrated – why were certain scenes chosen for illustration; how do the illustrations differ between productions of the manuscripts?

The Shahnama is mythological, filled with dragons, witches, and other mythical happenings. Professor Melville, however, is an historian, and is now turning his sights to chronicles. These chronicles are a record of real history, and as with the Shahnama are often illustrated. Investigating illustrating history - why some manuscripts are illustrated and others aren’t, and so on - provides a rich vein of inquiry. Rather than exploring what might have actually happened in a given time, the question is how that history is visualised and interpreted.

Part 1:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF46QrF-Vs4

You can view the rest of our Interview with a Fellow series on our YouTube page