(2012)  Page(s) 119.  Includes photo(s).
 
Of the many significant eastern manuscripts in the collection of the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, the Dilsuznama, MS. Ouseley 133, dated 860 (1455–56), is one of the earliest known literary works of Ottoman production....
To the right of the image, a pair of human lovers, she named Rose and he, Nightingale, repeat the exchange seated in their pavilion, tiled in the manner of the garden pavilions of the newly built palace at Edirne, and overlooking the rose bushes that dominate the painting in terms of scale. The flower heads and the blossoms are very carefully drawn and coloured in exact rendition of the variety of damask roses planted by Mehmet II in the palace grounds.
Gul had a handkerchief with gold brocade
She gave it to Nightingale in the hour when she was leaving.
She said: keep this in memory of me,
Oh my beloved, my perfume is in this handkerchief so never lose it.
....Floral and springtime themes, modelled on those of the classical world, had been popular with Byzantine writers. The work of the 4th-century pagan orator Libanius incorporated motifs that were carried over into Christian writing and art, and easily absorbed into the literary and artistic production of border areas of the Persianate world. ‘Delight in the songs of the birds and scents of the flowers’, he wrote, ‘the swallow sings in the spring, as does the nightingale . . . The meadows are sweet . . . with roses, with violets, with lilies ... Just as the sultan was referred to or addressed in poetry as a flower or a slender cypress tree, and the Prophet alluded to as a rose, Byzantine precedents described the Virgin Mary as ‘a sweet smelling meadow . . . a flower .. . the fount of a perennial stream’.25 The sermons of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who belonged to the monastic Cistercian order in north-eastern France in the mid-12th century, were instrumental in formalising the rose as a symbol of Mary. The Marian cult he inspired proliferated throughout Europe, extending the reach of devotion to Mary and her association with imagery of the rose that had already been established in Byzantine Constantinople.....
A miniature of the ‘Lover with Reason’ from a mid-15th century Roman de la Rose from the Bodleian Library collection depicts the same variety of many-petalled, flat pink damask roses seen in the Oxford Dilsuznama