Women’s involvement in the complex process of manuscript production is visible in the decorated margins and closing colophons of elegantly-illuminated Armenian Gospels and liturgical books—where they appear as commissioners, sponsors, scribes, illuminators, commemorators, intercessors, teachers, and witnesses. Dr. Ani Shahinian, cataloger of Armenian Manuscripts at HMML, shares some examples: hmml.org/stories/series-woman-veiled-in-ink It's the latest story in HMML's editorial series, where curators and catalogers use manuscripts and artwork to examine how specific themes run across HMML's collections, which preserve digital and microfilm copies of 450,000+ manuscripts photographed in partnership with 800+ libraries worldwide. Our current theme is #Women; new stories are posted every month. Previous themes looked at Animals, Music, Food, Medicine, the Celestial, Travel, Story Time, Banned Books, Death & Mourning, Fragments, Scribes, Weather, and Migration in HMML's collections. Browse all at hmml.org/stories. (fb)

İbrahim Müteferrika (d. 1745) grew up in Cluj-Napoca (a city in what is now Romania) and came from a Transylvanian Unitarian background. Eventually, İbrahim Müteferrika moved to Istanbul, became a Muslim, and was famous for (among other things) establishing the first-ever Islamic printing press in the 1720s. SJRB 00123 is one of his print editions, now held at Saint John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota. In his Turkish "Risâle-i İslâmiyye," written in 1710, he describes his own wrestling with Christian doctrines, intra-Christian and interreligious controversies, and his eventual acceptance of Islam. He extensively criticizes the papacy and writes against the ongoing Christianization of the "New World." He even quotes numerous Bible passages in Latin—in Arabic script!—and offers his Islamic interpretation of them, as seen in the red text manuscript pictured here. HMML's first manuscript with this text is NUB 00711 (pictured), copied in Tuzla (Bosnia and Herzegovina) in 1768 and now in the collection of National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Sarajevo. It is a valuable testimony to the life of one former member of this fascinating religious community and their relationship to the Christian and Muslim powers around them. View each page in HMML Reading Room: * NUB 00711: https://w3id.org/vhmml/readingRoom/view/870943 * SJRB 00123: https://w3id.org/vhmml/readingRoom/view/520318 Pictured: the Unitarian church in Cluj-Napoca, photographed by HMML curator Dr. Josh Mugler in 2022, and a folio in manuscript NUB 00711. (fb)