Women of Tahirid Yemen

“Molheres xi Rada” (Women of Rada’a), fols. 19/20 of Casanatense MS 1881

2024 AIYS Fellowship Report:

Tahirid Women in the Codex Casanatense at the Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome

Lily V. Filson, Ph.D.

During my AIYS fellowship in February 2024, I traveled to Rome to investigate the sixteenth-century Codex Casanatense (MS 1881) at the Biblioteca Casanatense. High-resolution images of this manuscript are freely available online, but viewing it in person allowed me to identify key discrepancies between the original Portuguese text that accompanies and its existing scholarship. Notably, I discovered that the translation "Women of Shiraz," published by Franco Maria Ricci (1984) and cited by subsequent scholarship, in the original is written "Women of Rad’a," a city that served as the capital of the Tahirid dynasty in southern Yemen during the sixteenth century. This correction significantly alters our understanding of the codex, as it now offers the earliest known visual documentation of elite Tahirid women—an aspect of Yemeni history which otherwise leaves no trace in the visual record. The Codex Casanatense’s watercolors are generally recognized to be the work of an Indian painter in the service of a Portuguese patron in Goa; scholars have pointed out that the artist may have been a first-hand witness to the varied peoples and costumes depicted in the work which spans East Africa to China; the historical accuracy of other folios in the works have been affirmed by its scholars.

This finding builds on my previous research, funded by a 2020 Renaissance Society of America Short Term Grant, which analyzed descriptions of Tahirid Yemen in the  Itinerary (1510) of Italian traveler Ludovico de’ Varthema. Varthema's account sensationally described a fraught interlude with the unnamed wife of the Tahirid Sultan, the last of the dynasty before the Ottoman colonization of Yemen later in the sixteenth century. Later German editions of the Itinerary featured woodcut illustrations by Jörg Breu, two of which depict the artist’s imagining of the Tahirid Sultana, but the Codex Casanatense is the only visual document of an elite women in Rad’a in same time period with any historical credibility.

Thanks to the support of the AIYS fellowship, I was able to acquire a new understanding of the Codex Casanatense that opens future studies about the visual historiography of Tahirid Yemen, a region and dynasty minimally represented in early modern European art and texts. This finding not only corrects an entrenched misreading in the scholarship but also provides a unique and detailed visual record of elite Tahirid women. Next, I plan to synthesize my research on the Codex Casanatense and Varthema’s Itinerary in a future volume that will insert Yemen into the emerging global histories of the sixteenth century and the Early Modern period more generally. I look forward to keeping the AIYS community updated on my progress and publications!