Representing Wonders and Legends: Painted Illustrations in the Süleymaniye Book of Roger (1469) and the Bodleian Book of Curiosities (12th-13th c.)
Creators: name: Molina, Sarah
Publisher: name: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries
Year: 2016

description: Two of the earliest and most significant illustrated cartographic manuscripts in the Arab-
Islamic tradition include The Delight of Him Who Desires to Journey Through the Climates,
more commonly known as The Book of Roger, (c. 1154) and The Book of Curiosities of the
Sciences and Marvels for the Eye (11th century). An encyclopedic volume of the world, The
Book of Roger was compiled by Abu Abdullah Mohammed Ibn al-Sharif al-Idrisi for King Roger
II of Sicily and contains a comprehensive account of geography, history, and culture. An
unknown author who most likely lived in Egypt wrote and illustrated The Book of Curiosities,
which consists of two parts—ten chapters concerning the celestial world order and twenty-five
chapters describing earthly matters. This paper focuses on a 12th- or 13th-century copy of The
Book of Curiosities held at the Bodleian Library of Oxford (MS Arab. c. 90) and a copy of The
Book of Roger made in 1469 by the copyist ‘Ali ibn Hasan al-‘Ajami and owned by the
Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi in Istanbul (MS Fazil Ahmed Paşa 955). Not only are these two of
the most complete copies of their respective works, but these manuscripts also include additional
illustrations that cannot be found in any other version of The Book of Roger or The Book of
Curiosities (Figures 1-3). These added illustrations, inserted by a later reader or owner in the
case of The Book of Curiosities and included by the copyist in The Book of Roger, provide an
alternative conception of manuscripts. The manuscript is not a singular production of al-Idrisi or
the unknown Egyptian author but a complex anthology of thought—the “final copy” can be
understood as a compilation of perspectives from the original author, the author’s sources, the
copyist, and later readers or owners.
The three added illustrations of The Book of Roger and The Book of Curiosities range in
subject matter, but they all include written captions and are framed by borders drawn in red or
reddish brown ink. The two illustrations from The Book of Curiosities have been painted onto
pages originally left blank—these pages were left blank to accommodate a large circular world
map that can found at the end of the manuscript’s first book. One of these added illustrations
depicts the legendary Waqwaq tree, a human-tree hybrid well-documented in early medieval
travel literature and reported to exist at the edge of the world. The other illustration, painted on
the facing page, is described by its caption as a “marvelous melon” plant and depicts fanciful
animal heads growing from a leafy plant. Al-‘Ajami, the 15th-century copyist of The Book of
Roger, chose to add his illustration in the midst of transcribing the manuscript. This additional
illustration of the lands of Gog and Magog, a popular apocalyptic legend recorded in both Bible
and the Qur’an, can be found in the midst of al-Idrisi’s textual description of the legend.6
Although I will examine the visual elements and conceptual implications of each illustration
separately, analyzing the three together provokes larger questions about the discourse of painted
illustrations in manuscripts and the purposes of cartography in the medieval era.
This paper seeks to contextualize the three illustrations in their respective manuscripts
and the later periods during which they were created or inserted. To contextualize these three
illustrations, I use four different lenses—geography, cosmography, wonder, and legends—to
encompass the multiplicity of perspectives that medieval readers might have utilized to
understand these manuscripts and the world around them. Ultimately, I use these four
frameworks to elucidate the following arguments: 1) the insertion of painted illustrations reflects
a tradition of using the visual arts to convey wonder; 2) the descriptions and illustrations of
wondrous creatures and places convey conceptual boundaries between the center and the edge of
the world; and 3) these inserted illustrations might have inspired curiosity and travel to faraway
lands while simultaneously affirming the centrality of the reader’s known world.