Persian Manuscripts in the Libraries of McGill University: English 2005

McGill University's impressive library collection contains approximately 334 Persian manuscripts acquired over a period of eighty years by esteemed scholars such as Casey A. Wood, Max Meyerhof, and Wladimir Ivanow. The manuscripts collected by Ivanow, a Russian scholar, come from Lucknow and Sandila in northeast India, where most of them had been copied, making them of great interest to paleographers and codicologists. Adam Gaceks' catalogue describes these manuscripts, which embrace all aspects of Islamic literature, including Qur'anic exegesis, tradition, jurisprudence, philosophy, theology, mysticism, history, belles lettres, and science. Works in medicine and the natural sciences, particularly hunting, falconry, and farriery, are well represented. The Persian manuscripts are preserved in four McGill University collections, the Blacker-Wood Library of Zoology and Ornithology, the Osler Library of the History of Medicine, the Islamic Studies Library, and Rare Books and Special Collections Division. Forty-one are illuminated while twenty-two contain painted illustrations. The catalogue is arranged alphabetically by title, which is given in transliteration and Arabic script.