with Jaimee Comstock-Skipp

Jaimee Comstock-Skipp will give a lecture on a recently conserved illustrated Persian manuscript belonging to Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson located in Sissinghurst Castle. It is a copy of Yusuf and Zulaykha, a mystical love story composed by the poet Jami, made in Bukhara (present-day Uzbekistan) in the early 1570s. The manuscript is connected to an extraordinary period of commercial productivity in the absence of royal patronage, and is connected to spiritual and economic networks spanning Central and South Asia. The manuscript may have journeyed from its original creation site in Central Asia; was dispatched to India for sale in the country ca. late 16th century or early in the 17th; then perhaps it had a stint in Istanbul or Iran in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, before being carried off to British soil by Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson. Or, Harold’s father, Arthur Nicolson—Lord Carnock—was part of the British Legation in Tehran and may have acquired it there earlier. The Bukharan manuscript testifies to thriving trade crossing continents in the early-modern period, as in our present age.

About the Speaker:

Jaimee Comstock-Skipp holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley with a specialty in the Arabic and Persian languages. She obtained a first MA from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art (Massachusetts, USA), and a second MA from The Courtauld Institute of Art (London, UK), where she studied Mongol through Safavid book arts predominantly from Iran. She completed her PhD at Leiden University (2022) writing a dissertation on illustrated epic and biographical manuscripts of the Abu’l-Khairids, and their diplomatic exchanges between courts within Central Asia and the broader Turco-Persianate sphere encompassing Safavids, Ottomans, and Mughals. She has held visiting fellowships at the Oxford Nizami Ganjavi Centre (Oxford, UK) and the Warburg Institute (London, UK). She is currently a Junior Research Fellow tutoring in Persian at New College, and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies between 2024—2027.