Love in the Land of Goshen: Haggadah, History, and the Making of British Library, MS Oriental 2737

Abstract

Scholarly opinions regarding the illuminated haggadot of Iberia are derived from study of a cluster of deluxe manuscripts produced in the Crown of Aragón in the fourteenth century, none of which contains a colophon. The so-called Hispano-Moresque Haggadah (London, British Library, MS Oriental 2737), made in Castile in the late thirteenth century, remains largely unexamined despite the ambitious nature of its decorative program and its likely status as the earliest witness to the haggadah’s separation from the mahzor (holiday prayer book) and development as an independent book. In Or. 2737, this early and experimental phase of the haggadah’s development is manifested in iconographic singularities that link the manuscript to a particular place, historical circumstance, and family—a situation that is unremarked in the literature to date. There is also evidence suggesting that Or. 2737, and possibly other Iberian illuminated haggadot, were commissioned and designed for women as wedding gifts. The connection between women and illuminated haggadot proposed in this article does not rely on a determination of female literacy and offers compelling possibilities for further study of other illuminated medieval manuscripts.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.