Riaz Howey

Premodern Agricultural Knowledge in New Persian

How, in what fields, and by which authorities do premodern New Persian agricultural texts stake claims to contain knowledge? How does evidence in manuscripts from 1200–1600 CE support or challenge modern constructions of a stable tradition of Persian agriculture?

Addressing these questions, Riaz Howey’s dissertation project focusses on a reading of the Ās̱ār va Aḥyāʾ, or Vestiges and the Living, a partially surviving agricultural treatise attributed to an elite figure of the Ilkhanid period, Rashīd al-Dīn Fażlullāh Hamadānī (1247–1318). The text is compared with other Persian tracts on agriculture, as well as relevant sources in other languages, investigating how readers, translators and copyists situated their textual practices in this field.

Particular attention is paid to changes in the social, technical and material conditions under which literate agricultural knowledge was performed and reproduced. The project engages with the history of science in the early Islamic World, in Persian-language sources and in the Mongol Empire.

Riaz Howey completed an MA in global history at the Freie Universität Berlin in 2020.  At the MPIWG he is currently also a predoctoral fellow in the working group Agriculture and the Making of the Sciences. He is enrolled as a doctoral student at the University of Bonn in the Department of Islamic Studies and Near Eastern Languages.

Find Riaz's profile on the Website of the International Max Planck Research School – "Knowledge and its Resources" (IMPRS-KIR).