The founder of the Safavid dynasty (1501–1722), Shāh Esmāʿil I (r. 1501–24), who was the head of the Sufis of Ardabil, established Shiite Islam as the state religion. This helped create a national identity among tribes and united the country against the Ottomans, Mamluks, and Timurids. Far from the criticism he faced after his defeat in the Chālderān battle, which put Iran in a terrible state, he was celebrated as a national hero and became a mythical character among the people. His adventure was a popular story that storytellers related in coffee houses. Though oral tradition has preserved the details of the story, it is also written down and, in some versions, illustrated in manuscripts.

Barry Wood's research since 2002 has focused on the panegyric epic story of the founder of the Safavid dynasty and different versions of the anonymous histories of Shāh Esmāʿil. His recent book, The Adventures of Shāh Esmāʿil: A Seventeenth-Century Persian Popular Romance, translates one of the versions of the anonymous history, titled by its first editor ʿĀlamārā-ye Shāh Esmāʿil. According to the table in the book's preface (pp. xxii–xxiii), the author has identified 12 manuscripts of the anonymous history of Shāh Esmāʿil with dissimilar titles, and the manuscripts’ dated colophons locate them between the 1680s and the 1820s. Wood's translation is based on the version edited, published, and owned by Aṣghar Montaẓer-Ṣāḥeb. In 1965 the manuscript was introduced by him in the Persian magazine Yaghmā; in 1971 he edited and published the story as a book, which has recently been republished for the third time (Aṣghar Montaẓer-Ṣāḥeb, ʿĀlamārā-ye Shāh Esmāʿil. 1392/2013, Tehran. Bongāh-e tarjome va nashr-e ketāb). The story – the latest-dated surviving version written in 1240/1825 – has had “the most time to evolve” and, Wood declares, is considered “the richest, most detailed one” (p. xxi).

The book The Adventures of Shāh Esmāʿil contains an 11-page preface, 467 pages of story, and a bibliography, as well as an index of names and locations. In the preface Wood establishes his discussion of three main subjects: the story's important role in understanding the popular mentality of the people of the late and post-Safavid period, lingual and structural characteristics of the text, and the story's potential areas of further research. The preface is short, concise, and inspiring. In its first lines the author introduces the text as a pseudo-historical narrative whose tales “are loosely based in historical fact but leavened with a great deal of what is apparently folk memory about a pivotal period in Iranian history”; the author believes it can open “a fascinating window on the way in which people in early modern Iran formed, transformed, and passed on the memory of a key figure in their cultural development” (p. xiii). Later he unpacks these information-dense statements and briefly describes the story's content and the basic principles of professional storytelling. Wood proposes theories about how the story was formed, its evolution in the hand of professional storytellers, and the reasons why the story remained in vogue for two centuries. It seems, however, that the author deliberately avoids a methodological discussion. Instead, he gives information and clues to evoke curiosity, avoiding going into great detail, and offers the reader the liberty to further investigate. Wood refers to previous scholarship about the relationship of the story to the official Safavid historiography and the differences in various versions of the story. Moreover, he discusses the pictorial programmes of the illustrated versions and suggests the relationship of the pictorial programme to the manuscripts’ patronage. Although he reveals the outcomes of this earlier research, he believes that the issues leave room for more studies.

Wood's brief preface contains no information about the codicological features of the manuscript. It is clear that the author did not have access to the manuscript preserved in the private collection of Montaẓer-Ṣāḥeb, and his focus is apparently on the story and not on the particularities of the manuscript. Yet, exploring the features mentioned in the preface of the Persian version could provide clues to the patronage and position of the story in the mind of its patron. The story was written by the one copyist, ebn-e Moḥammad Jaʿfar Ḥasan al-Musavi, as a section of the miscellany comprising the adventures of Shāh Esmāʿil and as two parts of the first volume of Khwānd-e Mir's history, Ḥabib al-Siyar for Mirzā Ebrāhim valad-e Mirzā Maʿṣum (Montaẓer-Ṣāḥeb, ʿĀlamārā-ye Shāh Esmāʿil, p. 20). Nevertheless, the preface provides a convincing summary of the story's characteristics, the importance of the genre as an unmined resource about religious beliefs and cultural standards of the common people, and the story's potential for further investigation.

Wood describes aspects of the story that were transmitted orally in the popular narrative, including the repeated verbal formulae for changing the scenes of the narrative, stock phrases, and popular idioms and proverbs. Like the Persian version, all historical characters and events are described in the footnotes. Moreover, in the cases of vague or illegible words, Wood's translation provides the opportunity to compare the word with two other versions of the story: one kept in the Chester Beatty Library, and the Shokri edition of the story, ʿĀlamārā-ye Ṣafavi, preserved in the Majles-e Shorā-ye Eslāmi library. Wood spots the different intonations used in the story and keeps the changes from popular to formal language, which retains the spirit of the story. His work is an important contribution to scholarship that draws attention to the role of popular tradition in understanding the history and culture of the country as well as to its intersections with official records. The fluent translation of the text will definitely bring the story within easier reach of scholars across disciplines of Iranian studies.