The Haggadah guides participants through the Passover Seder and the story of the Israelites’ delivery from Egypt. Judaica librarian Jeanne-Marie Musto highlights different illustrated Haggadot from the Library’s Dorot Jewish Division—both handwritten and printed, dating from the 15th to the 19th centuries—and examines how their imagery and design evolved across generations. Founded in 1897, the Dorot Division holds over a quarter of a million books, manuscripts, periodicals, and other materials, making it one of the world’s leading collections of Hebraica and Judaica.

This session explores textual artifacts that have originated or been adapted for use in one or more of the cultural traditions of Islam. The interplay between cultures, including relationships between different Islamic cultures or between Islamic and other cultures, will be a particular focus. The geographical range of our session’s presentations extends from China to Venice; the time frame focuses on the late medieval through early modern periods. A variety of media are considered, including pre-Ottoman funerary monuments (kümbets); the first Arabic printed book; banners inscribed with Qurʾānic “victory verses” (Rāyāt-e Naṣr-ʾĀyāt); and everyday objects. While attending to the specificity of local traditions, the session considers the significance of these textual artifacts in intercultural and historiographic perspective.

This session, sponsored by the Bibliographical Society of America, explores indigenous Mexica and Quecha manuscripts created between the 14th and early 17th centuries in what is today Mexico and Peru. The impact of European colonial culture on the manuscripts’ creation and interpretation will be analyzed through a variety of approaches. The presentations will also consider how the manuscripts’ creators conveyed their lived cultures, and whether the manuscripts enable otherwise ephemeral aspects of those cultures, such as music and movement, to be recovered.

Examining the sixteenth-century Mexica manuscript Cantares Mexicanos through sound studies and a performative lens, Gema Valencia-Turco proposes that the texts, influenced by both pre- and post-conquest contexts, constitute a genre in themselves. Rather than purely literary expression, they represent a type of early-colonial libretto constituting a new generation’s response to an imposed new life. George Thomas focuses on an early 17th-century Quecha manuscript, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s New Chronicle. Through comparing the New Chronicle with printed illustrations in imported works of literature, Thomas demonstrates how Guaman Poma appropriated their imagery and, in so doing, presented a critique of Peruvian colonial rule. Taking a historiographical perspective, Seonaid Valiant discusses Zelia Nuttall, a self-trained scholar who raised awareness of the indigenous manuscripts of Mexico through her facsimile editions. Drawing on the manuscripts’ depictions of astronomical practices, Nuttall developed a ceremony to demonstrate the “shadowless moment” sacred to the Mexica. She then worked to institute a school festival based on this ceremony, hoping to impart the significance of ancient Mexica culture to future generations.