Fwd: Next up in the SIMS Online Lecture Series: The Guide to Goodness: An Islamic Medieval Bestseller, Copies at Penn, and Their Contexts_December 5
Evyn Kropf
From: Ransom, Lynn
Subject: Next up in the SIMS Online Lecture Series: The Guide to Goodness: An Islamic Medieval Bestseller, Copies at Penn, and Their Contexts_December 5
The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies is delighted to announce the final lecture in this fall’s Online Lecture Series. All are welcome to attend!
The Guide to Goodness: An Islamic Medieval Bestseller, Copies at Penn, and Their Contexts
Ali Noori, Bard Early College Brooklyn & 2025-2026 SIMS Visiting Research Fellow
Friday, December 5, 2025, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EST
This talk explores the famous 15th-century Islamic devotional manual Dalail al-Khayrat (The Guide to Goodness), composed by the North African Sufi mystic al-Jazuli (d. 1465). I will begin with a general introduction to the text and its significance, before turning to an examination of the copies housed at the University of Pennsylvania and their particularities. Through my analysis of the copies, I will theorize the meaning of reading in the context of invocation of blessings upon the Prophet––a practice that constitutes the substance of the Dalail. I will argue that the book is representative of a 15th-century shift in practices of reading, away from individually tailored pious reading to mass-produced texts like the Dalail. To conclude, I will draw attention to the striking parallels between the rise of devotional manuals like the Dalail and the contemporaneous popularity of the Book of Hours in Europe. These developments, I suggest, raise exciting questions about reading and devotion across cultures in the early modern period.
More information and a link to register are available here.
And coming up in 2026 …
Grid as Ground: Ruled Lines and Manuscript Images
Hanna Vorholt, University of York
Friday, February 20, 2026, 12:00 - 1:30 pm EST
Most printed and electronic documents, like this one, show text organized along invisible horizontal and vertical lines. In medieval Europe, where the primary text technology was the manuscript, lines formed visible grids on the parchment or paper surface. Scholars have examined the resulting patterns and analyzed their role in the layout of the written text. While manuscript images were frequently executed on the same ruled surfaces as the written text, their relationship to the ruling has rarely been the subject of research. Hanna Vorholt’s forthcoming book Grid as Ground provides the first sustained analysis of this topic across the wide range of image types encountered in manuscripts, from tables, maps, and diagrams, to figural imagery across different domains of learning. The lecture introduces the project and some of the opportunities this analysis presents for humanities research on lines and grids as tools for cognition, creativity, and control.
More information and a link to register are available here.