Dr Lucy Deacon
Centre for Research Collections Fellow, August 2022 - January 2023
Home Institution: University of Edinburgh
Eleanor Lucy Deacon is a specialist in devotional drama with an advanced knowledge of Persian, and a background in performing arts. Her research to date has largely concerned the Iranian Shiʿi tradition of taʿziyeh-khānī. She has published on topics from the inception of the tradition in the 17th century, to its development during the 19th century C.E., and its ongoing role in present-day popular piety. Her approach has combined fieldwork with the examination of historical scripts, in manuscript form, drawing from those in the collections of European libraries, and working extensively with the Cerulli Collection held by the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Most recently she has turned her attention to the nature of such collections themselves and the journeys of Persian and Arabic manuscripts, between their places of initial provenance and Europe. This encompasses the history of manuscript circulation in the Islamicate world, and colonial cultural practices.
Deacon’s PhD, entitled ‘Retelling Karbala: A Literary Analysis of Key Plays of the Iranian Taʿziyeh Repertoire,’ was awarded by the University of Edinburgh, from which she also holds an MSc in Persian Civilisation, and an MA in Arabic and Persian. She has worked for the University’s department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies as a Persian language tutor and a Teaching Fellow in Islamic Studies, and for the Centre for Research Collections as a researcher in Arabic and Persian manuscripts. She is on the Editorial Board of the journal Medieval English Theatre.
Project Title: The Edinburgh “Oriental Collection”: Tracing Colonial Cultural Practice, and the Early Modern Circulation of Arabic and Persian Manuscripts
The “Oriental Collection” held by the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Research Collections consists of nearly 700 manuscripts. Around 350 of these are in Persian, and 200 in Arabic. These range in date from the 11th to the 19th centuries C.E., and in content from works of historiography, sacred texts, mourning recitations for the Shi’i Imams, and Islamic jurisprudence, to astronomy, mathematics, poetry, proverbs, and divination materials. Deacon has worked with the CRC team to conduct preliminary research into the provenance of this collection, finding that the vast majority of these items were procured in South Asia by Scottish employees of the East India Company, or the British Raj, who later bequeathed them to the University. While the items in question were procured in South Asia, many had been produced in other areas of the Islamicate world.
During her Fellowship at IASH, Deacon will take this research to new levels; she will further probe the initial provenance and custodial history of these items, and the acquisition methods involved in their journeys into the collection. The project has two branches: to establish what this collection tells us about the circulation of manuscripts between the Middle East and South Asia during the Early Modern period; and to ask how the procuration of such materials by the Edinburgh collection’s donors reflects the colonial encounters and intellectual trends of their time.
The research will involve examination of the physical evidence offered by the manuscripts (colophons, seals, flyleaf annotations, and codicological features), as well as delving into the travelogues and memoires of the donors and their associates.