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Preservation, Prohibition and Provenance: Addressing the Mysteries of the Cerulli Collection of Taʿziyeh Manuscripts

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  • 2025
Submitted to:
  • The Vatican Library Review. - 2025, vol. 4, no. 2, p. 233-254
devotional drama
taʿziyeh-khani
Enrico Cerulli
Italian diplomatic relations
Ethiopia
Pahlavi Iran
manuscript collection culture
archiving oral tradition
popular piety
English The Cerulli Persian collection comprises 1055 manuscripts belonging to the Shiʿi tradition of devotional drama taʿziyeh-khani. It is by far the largest collection of playscripts of this genre and evidences the tradition’s broad dramatic scope, going well beyond the episodes treating the martyrdoms of Hosayn Ibn Ali and his companions at Karbala, for which the taʿziyeh is best known, and including many other religious stories, mystical, and even comic episodes. The collection was gathered in the 1950s by Enrico Cerulli, then Italian Ambassador to Iran, at a time when the tradition had been subject to sporadic restrictions under the Pahlavi Shahs. This paper investigates how Cerulli assembled this collection, and how his attention to taʿziyeh fitted within his wider scholarly inquiries. It traces his network of contacts from Iran to the Vatican, revealing a rich story involving diplomats, scholars, and itinerant performer-scribes.
Faculty
Faculté des lettres et des sciences humaines
Department
Département d'anglais
Language
  • English
Classification
Arts, Human and Social Science
License
License undefined
Open access status
green
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/333996
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