Book excerpt: The first volume in the series Studies in Persian Cultural History is the edited volume based on the papers from the Second Shahnama round-table, held in 2003 in Cambridge and published by Charles Melville in 2006 (The Centre of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge). This volume brings together a collection of papers exploring many different aspects of the Shahnama, both as literature and as the object of royal patronage. It focuses particularly on the manuscripts in which the poem has been preserved from the thirteenth century onwards, and the relationships between Firdausi's text and the rich variety of the miniature paintings created to illustrate it.