Kathryn Babayan

University of Michigan

2022 Fatema Mernissi Book Award Honorable Mention

The City as Anthology: Eroticism and Urbanity in Early Modern Isfahan

Stanford University Press 

The City as Anthology: Eroticism and Urbanity in Early Modern Isfahan is an evocative exploration of sociability, sensuality, and urban life in seventeenth-century Isfahan, as seen through the lens of the household anthologies (majmu’a) of eight city residents. Kathryn Babayan’s careful and creative reading of these rich, underutilized sources alongside the city’s monuments melds scholarship on urban space with historiographies of the book and illuminates the social and cultural history of Safavid Isfahan, surmounting the challenges posed by the lack of surviving city or state archives. Examining the wide variety of texts and images these anthologies contained, the architecture and events that inspired them, and the curatorial choices that informed their compilation, the book paints a vivid picture of Isfahan as both an imagined utopian city and a space of everyday sociability—a relational space of readers and writers, of friendship, family, and desire.

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