Objects, Images, Stories: Simon Digby’s Historical Methods

What histories do objects like coins or gems help us to trace? How can we read photographs and paintings? How do fictional tales, imaginative biographies, basic lexicons, or accounts of Sufi masters code intellectual worlds and reveal cultural and religious shifts? What range of sources is available to the historian of medieval and early modern India? How can textual sources illuminate material objects, sites, and practices, and vice versa? What historical methods do the different sources and material objects require?

Drawing on the rich scholarship of Simon E. Digby (1932-2010) on South Asian medieval history and culture, the essays in this volume offer method lessons in a wide range of historical fields.