This is the first book-length study of the famous, or perhaps infamous, Vis and Rāmin (henceforth VR) of Fakhr al-Din Gorgāni to be written in a European language, and indeed perhaps in any language. (Maḥjub’s editorial introduction to VR, which runs about 100 pages, could be counted as a small monograph in its own right; Mazdāpur’s Gonāh-e Vis, despite the title, is a collection of articles of which only some engage with Gorgāni’s poem.) Six of the book’s twelve chapters are updated versions of prior publications dating from 2017 to 2019, and the other six are newly written for this volume. It is therefore possible to read most of the chapters as independent pieces, although the author Nahid Norozi has taken pains to lightly weave them together, mostly through cross-references in the footnotes. She also groups the chapters into four parts: concerning Gorgāni’s life, work, and reception (part 1, chs. 1–3); thematic studies of VR (part 2, chs. 4–6); the relationship between VR and later works of Persian literature (part 3A, chs. 7–9); and comparisons between VR and the Tristan cycle (part 3B, chs. 10–12).

The chapters in part 1 comprise all new material and serve as an excellent introduction to the state of the field. The first chapter, “Gorgāni and His Work,” provides us with the most up-to-date overview of what we can likely deduce about the author of VR and his sources. There is little here that is not already known to specialists; it covers the same approximate terrain as my introduction in Cross, “Poetics,” 7–36, but it goes more in depth and offers a fresh perspective on some long-standing questions, chief among them the nature of VR’s source(s), which Gorgāni calls Pahlavi at some moments and fārsi at others. Norozi’s interventions are measured and judicious; drawing from external and internal evidence, she argues that there were multiple versions of the tale in circulation, and concludes that Gorgāni likely worked from a source in New Persian verse, while taking account of these other versions (some in Middle Persian, to which he could have had some access) to produce a “reconstruction” of the tale that fit his purposes and spoke to his present circumstances (49–50). The second chapter, “Linguistic and Narrative-Stylistic Aspects of VR,” offers a brief review of the most prominent features of Gorgāni’s archaic language (discussed further by Hedāyat, Maḥjub, and Friedman), a discussion of his poetic style and imagery (see also Davis, Meisami, and Kunitzsch), and an analysis of his skills at narrative and characterization (rebutting the general disapproval of scholars like Pizzi, Gabrieli, Piemontese, and Bausani and siding instead with the more positive assessments of Wardrop and Bürgel). She joins the general consensus that Gorgāni can be credited with having “invented” a distinctive style of romance, a kind of “mixed genre” (building on Bürgel) that combines various elements to produce its unique effect. Although this survey is extensive, it cannot quite be counted as an exhaustive account of the literature on Gorgāni’s stylistics, as there is a body of modern scholarship in Persian on this topic as well that does not receive comment (I cite some examples in Cross, “Lives,” 539). The third chapter, “VR in the Anthologies, Manuscript Tradition, Editions, and Translations,” is short but thorough, providing an extensive survey of works in which passages of or references to VR appear, as well as a list of manuscripts, editions, and translations; much of the same information can be found in Storey/de Blois and the critical edition by T’odua and Gvaxaria, although there is a little more commentary here. Overall, although Part 1 does not quite reach the level of full comprehensiveness as far as the secondary scholarship is concerned, it will provide scholars of VR with everything they need to know to hit the ground running.

The discussion shifts to literary topics in part 2, starting with a chapter entitled “Dynamics of Feminine Desire and Strategies of Legitimating Sin” (ch. 4). Although this previously appeared as an article, it remains an excellent essay, offering a broad thematic analysis of VR as a whole. Its main arguments are comparable to Bürgel’s pioneering study in 1979, although it runs about twice as long at 58 pages. The starting premise of the analysis is that Gorgāni was fully aware of the scandalous and transgressive nature of his source(s), and he leveraged these elements to develop the unique thematics of his poem. The key leitmotif of VR, in this reading, might be “betrayal” (138)—not just in the many promises broken between the story’s characters, but in the way the story itself breaks with the social and narrative conventions that would be taken as normative by the primary audience. Following the story in sequential order, Norozi identifies two central elements that make this destabilization possible. The first is the role of women as the active protagonists of the story (Vis, Shahru, and the Nurse), who drive the plot forward and with whom the male characters are in a state of constant reaction. Norozi suspects this focus on women may have been the most striking feature of the story in Gorgāni’s time (147) and may bear some traces of matriarchy or matriarchal concepts (93, 137) in Iranian society, although on this point she does not elaborate. The second element is rooted in the dualist tension between good and evil (128, 142), which she again locates in the story’s origins in pre-Islamic, Mazdean culture. This underlying conflict manifests itself in a variety of ways: between the old and the new (Mobad vs. Rāmin), between the rose and the violet (Gol vs. Vis), between nature (destiny) and culture (the law), between divine decree and the wheel of fortune. In an incisive gesture, Norozi overlays these dyads with an erotic impulse, which she theorizes through the push-and-pull rhythm of nāz-o niyāz (roughly, pleasure and pain, or fondness and fussing)—a dynamic that approaches, I might observe, the rhythm of qabż-o basṭ (constriction and expansion) that became an important concept in Sufi thought and practice.

These major claims are enriched with many insightful close readings. Observing how Vis simultaneously presents as a “proto-feminist” (scare quotes original, 95) and as a champion of patriarchal norms and values (106), Norozi concludes that this inherent tension gradually forces a conceptual revolution from an externally oriented notion of fidelity (fidelity to the Other) to an internally oriented one (fidelity to the Self, 100). A similar crisis arises in the figures of Mobad and Rāmin, who both engage with Vis from a faulty or incomplete understanding of love. Mobad, as the story’s “priest,” cannot parse Vis’s newly discovered “amorous ethic” or “religion of love” (123–24) through his dogmatic, legalist vision of the world, whereas Rāmin is devoted to the superficial veneration of the rose (in a lyrical sense) and ultimately abandons Vis, whose signature flower is the violet, for a woman literally named Rose (Gol). (If the reader hears echoes of Meisami and Bürgel in this analysis, they are not mistaken: Bürgel is amply cited throughout, and although Meisami’s work does not appear in the chapter’s footnotes, Norozi constructs a similar argument to what is found in Meisami’s 1987 article “Kings and Lovers.”) If we read VR from this standpoint, that is, as a narrative in which the “legal rights” of kings are overturned in favor of the “natural rights” of lovers, then the message is indeed a radical one, not devoid of political implications; after all, the final “betrayal” of the story is a coup d’état. Going back to her main point, Norozi contends that Gorgāni was aware of these implications and manifests them through his numerous internal contradictions: Vis’s depiction as simultaneously angelic and demonic, the contrast of Vis’s faith through treachery and Mobad’s treason through fidelity, and the paradox that true sovereignty can only be achieved by overthrowing the sovereign. Although this helps explain why Gorgāni’s model was later “corrected” by the likes of Irānshāh and Neẓāmi (144–46), it also draws some intriguing connections with Ferdowsi: Norozi suggests that for both authors the leveraging of tensions latent in the material creates something of a critical distance between reader and story, opening space for new kinds of inquiry (149).

This is an outstanding analysis, and for me one of the two highlights of the book. Part of the reason I devote so much space to detailing its arguments above is because it encapsulates the main takeaways found in the remaining chapters of part 2 (and some in part 3, for that matter), which take on a typological and descriptive approach. They are therefore less impactful in shaping our overall understanding of VR as a text, but offer a valuable service by fleshing out various themes for comparison with other texts. Chapter 5, “The Garden of the Amorous Encounter in VR,” reads as advertised, detailing the various utilizations of gardens or garden imagery: as Paradise, as a place of testament, as a metaphor of home, as a sanctifying or legitimizing space, and so on. It is a useful survey, although admittedly free in its understanding of “garden,” and the examples cited receive detailed explication. However, it does not move beyond its categorizing mission, save for a few passing allusions to Neẓāmi and Khwāju. Chapter 6, which has not appeared before in print, is a survey of “Magic, Women, and Demons in VR.” Again using a typological method, Norozi begins by distinguishing “real-operative” magic from its “metaphorical-rhetorical” counterpart (194). Instances of the former are quite rare and fall exclusively to the purview of women associated with demons—the Nurse and Zarringis. Far more common are forms of “semantic” sorcery, described by terms such as jādu, jādugar, afsun, dastān, ṭelesm, rang, neyrang, fetna, and ḥila. In Norozi’s analysis, these establish the character possessing or doing them as simply wielding a certain kind of supernatural power over others, and are morally neutral in and of themselves. The same tendency is observed in the case of VR’s “demons,” who are less flesh-and-bone adversaries of humankind and more like metaphorical manifestations of human attributes: anxiety (andisha), separation (hejrān), desire (āz), rashness (tondi), sorcery (jādu), and so on. As in the case of magic, some of these attributes are not inherently negative: the div of ignorance (nādān) is counterbalanced by the div of regret (pashimān), for example, eliciting an intriguing connection with the Qur’anic notions of the commanding self (al-nafs al-ammāra) and the blaming self (al-nafs al-lawwāma). Perhaps the greatest power of them all is the div of love (mehr or ʿeshq), a destabilizing force strongly (although not exclusively) associated with women. Norozi’s detailed study of the way Gorgāni makes use of the Vis-Eblis rhyme is quite interesting in this regard, and offers new insight into how we might read Vis’s imprisonment in the “devils’ grotto” (eshkaft-e divān). Although many of the core themes of these articles appear in chapter 4, their topical focus is a helpful supplement to similar studies by scholars like Meisami, Pierce, Choksy, and Morrison.

Part 3A revolves around comparative studies of VR with other works of Persian literature. Its highlight for me is chapter 7, a new article documenting VR’s reception in the tradition that expands and enriches the foundational work of Maḥjub (91–102). The result is a fascinating history that is far more complex and variegated than I realized. Contrary to the common assumption that most littérateurs found the poem scandalous or unpleasant, Norozi demonstrates that many influential writers—including Saʿdi, ʿAṭṭār, Sanāʾi, ʿErāqi, Savāji, Amir Khosrow, Rumi, ʿEmād Faqih Kermāni, and Khwāju Kermāni—held both the work and its protagonists in high regard. Her discussion of the latter three is especially interesting: Rumi, true to form, is quite sophisticated in his handling of Gorgāni’s characters, even using them in ways that would probably jar the expectations of readers who might expect a figure like Majnun to appear instead. ʿEmād shows his esteem of VR not only by incorporating its protagonists into his Maḥabbat-nāma, but by modeling the work itself on the dah-nāma form that Gorgāni had established. And Khwāju’s Homāy-o Homāyun is as much a response to VR as it is to Neẓāmi’s Khosrow Shirin, often giving preferential treatment to the former. The notion that VR was generally reviled by premodern readers therefore seems convincingly refuted, or at least complicated. In consequence, my appreciation for the impact of Neẓāmi, not only in his poetry but in the way he shaped the historiography, has only grown. Although he might have been a relative outlier in his dislike of VR, Norozi shows not only how much he drew from (and “corrected”) VR, but how much he masked this relationship by elevating Ferdowsi as his model (274). Neẓāmi’s engagement with VR extends beyond the domains of shared themes, parallel scenes, and indirect citations (of which there are many) to narrative mechanics: the chapter closes with an interesting analysis of the love-triangle dynamic in both works, showing how they place multiple triangles into dialogue with one another to produce quite different results (comparing Vis and Rāmin with Shirin and Farhād, for example).

Chapter 7 is the second highlight of the book for me, which is why I again devoted extra space to detailing its arguments. The remaining two chapters of part 3A, both revisions of previous scholarship, return to the case-study model that Norozi utilizes elsewhere, and tend toward a classifying method. In chapter 8, she compares the motif of the female lover encountering her male counterpart from an elevated position (a balcony, a terraced roof, pavilion, tower, etc.) across the work of Ferdowsi, Gorgāni, Neẓāmi, ʿAṭṭār, and Khwāju, describing the different ways this scene takes shape and plays out, such as in its relationship to movement (climbing the walls, or not), sound (music and song), speech (dialogue and debate), and vision (beholding the beloved without his knowing). Regardless, the climax of the scene tends to effect a spatial rearrangement, in which the female character descends from her elevated position to meet her beloved on a horizontal axis, with various context-specific implications that Norozi discusses in turn. Chapter 9 takes another theme, misogynistic discourse, and runs it across a similar gamut of poets. The analysis begins with a useful distinction between what she calls “gynophobia” and misogyny, the former being the ambient and collective antipathy toward women found in (medieval Islamic) society, whereas the latter reflects an intentional activation of that antipathy and its associated tropes by an individual character. With this distinction in place, Norozi argues that romance texts are relatively light in misogynistic content, at least in comparison with genres like theology and philosophy, although they certainly reflect the gynophobia of their milieu. This is partially due to the structure of romance itself, which conventionally accords women a prominent place in the plot, even if their ultimate function, as many scholars argue, is to act as temptresses and teachers to the male lead. Furthermore, in tracing the line from Ferdowsi to Khwāju, she notes the interesting trend of a steady decline in misogynistic statements, which, when they appear, are increasingly placed in the mouths of the story’s antagonists. Although the chapter has a wandering feel at times and fails to engage with some significant scholarship on the topic (in particular, the work of Gabbay and Meisami), it offers a helpful distinction to contemplate, provides a range of cases to consider, and postulates a trend that certainly deserves further investigation.

The final section of the book, part 3B, turns to a topic that has long captured the interest of VR scholars: its almost uncanny resemblance to the story of Tristan and Iseult. Chapter 10 sets the stage for this comparison with an overview of some of the most prominent examples of analogous characters and parallel episodes between the two tales. This is well-documented material, and similar reviews in English can be found in Davis and Utas, to name two recent examples. Chapter 11 continues in this vein, although with the intent of moving beyond structural analogs to literary similarities. This commendable idea introduces a problem, however. There is only one VR (save for the Georgian Visramiani, a close translation of the Persian, and Lāmeʿi’s highly divergent Ottoman Turkish version, written in the sixteenth century), but the Tristan cycle is an enormous corpus that appears in numerous locales, languages, forms, and genres. This offers a wealth of possibilities for text-to-text comparisons, and Norozi’s engagements with the Tristans of Béroul, Thomas, and Gottfried offer compelling examples of the insights that might emerge from such an endeavor. However, stylistic analysis does not quite seem to be the thrust of the chapter; it rather seems to be an intent to find evidence of transmission through shared literary features. For example, in looking for an analog to the famous letters of Vis to Rāmin, Norozi has to resort to some fragments of Tristan stories in Italian and Spanish dating to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A long extract of both passages is cited (414–18), but instead of following this with a detailed literary analysis, Norozi instead suggests that they might confirm the existence of a now-lost earlier Spanish text that did contain the letters, which might then suggest al-Andalus as a site where VR made its way into Europe, either through written or oral means (418). The twelfth and final chapter pursues similar arguments by looking at authorial attitudes toward the stories’ protagonists and antagonists, although the distinction between author, narrator, and character seems a bit fuzzy at times (for example, reading Vis’s letters as expressive of the author’s voice, rather than that of Vis herself). Ultimately, the comparison, at least for this reader, did a better job highlighting the differences than the similarities between these various texts. This is to be expected, after all: Béroul and Thomas are very different authors, even though they tell the same story, and so it is only natural that Gorgāni should have his own distinctive style too.

This brings me to the largest critique I have of this section, although it is less about the study per se and more about the methodological system in which it participates. It is quite clear that there are fascinating parallels between VR and the Tristan cycle, especially when one zooms out from a text-to-text comparison and takes in the entirety of the Tristan corpus, and a great deal has been written on this topic. But to then take that parallel as evidence of some form of transmission, and then to re-create the routes by which that transmission occurred, brings us a little too far into the realm of speculation for my comfort. Returning to the case of the letters, for example, most of the links posed remain conjectural. We have no evidence that VR had any noticeable presence in Arabic literature anywhere, let alone in the Maghrib, and if it was there, why are its earliest attestations (and the setting itself) so distinctly Brittonic? The only way to answer this is to assume that a version of VR was first “corrected” to fit the expectations of the ʿUdhrī Arabic stories that probably did make their way into al-Andalus (although it seems a stretch to assimilate a story like VR into the accounts we have of Qays and Lubna or Jamīl and Buthayna) or the mores of a Christian audience (changing the joyful ending to a tragic one—the transformation of “happy” Rāmin to “sad” Tristan); this proto-text would then have to be “creatively re-elaborated” in various ways by Béroul, Thomas, and the like to obtain the result we have (484). But what if we apply Occam’s razor? We know that authors add their own material to their stories; the example of ʿAyyuqi’s addition of numerous Shāhnāma-esque episodes to the ʿUdhrī love story of ʿUrwa b. Ḥizām is a good example of this, as I doubt he was relying on a now-lost Arabic version that contained this material. Could not the same argument be brought to the Tristan cycle, that somewhere along the way an author decided to add an epistolary exchange to a well-known story, in the hope that it would appeal to the taste of local audiences?

In all fairness, Norozi fully accepts the speculative nature of her points, emphasizing that the suggestion of a Christianized reworking of the Persian tale only holds “if we accept the hypothesis that VR, in some re-elaboration, summary, or adaptation unknown to us (written or more likely oral), could have circulated among medieval writers and storytellers and could have truly been a source of inspiration for the novels about Tristan” (454, emphasis mine), and concluding that whatever relationship exists, it is most likely grounded in oral rather than written modalities (485). Quite so: the sheer abundance of tropological and stylistic similarities, not only between VR and the Tristan cycle but in these literary cultures more broadly, makes it difficult to chalk up to sheer coincidence, and the fact remains that the two story arcs, from a bird’s-eye view, are strikingly similar. But so are other texts: Seyed-Gohrab has recently explored the relationship between Varqa and Golshāh and Floire and Blancheflor, which similarly suggests a loose but indirect connection. Therefore, ironically perhaps, Norozi’s strategy of casting such a wide net, looking at some eleven versions of Tristan and including tropes that are not strictly distinctive of VR (sending messages by arrow, addressing a sentimental object in a lyrical aside, minstrel characters) to amass such a body of connections, seems to me to better support the scenario of a shared storytelling space, with little new evidence to advance the proposition that VR has anything more than a distant relationship with the Tristan cycle. This is not to detract from the value of Norozi’s contribution to this important question, but rather to reflect on the challenges we face when doing broad comparative projects. As in many of its other chapters, this part of Esordi offers the reader a comprehensive survey of the sources available for continuing this enterprise, and I think any one of the many connections she identifies well merits further investigation in its own right.

The dual achievement of consolidation and contribution summarizes my overall take on the book. As a collection of articles supplemented with new material, there is inevitably quite a lot of repetition, and there are some small inconsistencies in style (for example, block quotes include Persian text except for chs. 4, 5, 8, and 9) and formatting (the original hyphenation is preserved on pp. 91, 189, etc.). But when read as a series of studies all dedicated to examining VR from different angles, it is a tremendous gift to the field. In choosing the chapters most pertinent to their interests, readers can quickly avail themselves of the most up-to-date and comprehensive summations of historical biography, the manuscript tradition, significant scenes and tropes, and points of comparison with both Persian and Western European literature. For the richest analytical engagement with VR itself, I would recommend chapter 4, which incorporates elements that are further discussed in some of the case-study chapters like 5, 6, 8, and 9; I also would like to highlight chapter 7 for significantly enriching our account of the complex and fragmentary ways by which VR persisted in the Persian literary tradition. Although I would not say the book as a whole proposes any radically new approaches in theory or methodology, and its engagement with scholarship is a little scattershot (I found many entries in the bibliography that were not discussed in the body text, and a few studies like those of Bürgel and Saccone were disproportionately utilized), it is a tremendous resource for all scholars of this endlessly intriguing story.