The translations of the Baháʼí Sacred Writings by Marzieh Gail (1908-1993) are foundational to Baháʼí worship in the English-speaking world. Her renderings of Bahá’u’lláh’s The Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Secret of Divine Civilization (with her father Ali-Kuli Khan), Memorials of the Faithful, and Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (with a committee at the Bahá’í World Center) exhibit the depth of her poetic scholarship and skill, inspired by in-person meetings with both ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi. Gail’s historiography has also left a major legacy, with biographies of the Greatest Holy Leaf and of Ali-Kuli Khan, as well a history of Islam among her writings.
Yet Gail also had a significant career as a scholar of Medieval and Renaissance Western Europe, writing three book-length studies of these eras between 1966-9. These two dimensions of Gail’s research – the Baháʼí scholar and the medievalist – have been kept separate in previous writing on Gail. Her obituary in the Baháʼí Studies Review hailed Gail as the “‘Patron Saint’ of Women Baháʼí Scholars” while confining her medieval scholarship to a brief note in the final paragraph. The Encyclopedia Iranica entry on Gail likewise makes only short mention of her writings on the Middle Ages, presenting them out of context with her broader scholarship. The authorial blurb in Gail’s 1968 Life in the Renaissance likewise mentions only that she “brings to her work on the Renaissance a broad grounding in both Eastern and Western culture” and that “she spent ten years in Europe, doing historical research on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.” Absent from this description is any specific mention of her already-extensive Baháʼí scholarship, or that she also spent those years in Europe pioneering for the Ten Year Crusade (1953-1963).
This paper is the first attempt to my knowledge to bring together these two facets of Gail’s career in one study, drawing on her out-of-print publications. It will examine how her Medieval and Renaissance interests informed her Baháʼí scholarship and translation and vice versa. First, this presentation will consider her three published works of Medieval and Renaissance scholarship: Avignon in Flower: 1309-1403 (1966), Life in the Renaissance (1968) and The Three Popes: An Account of the Great Schism – When Rival Popes in Rome, Avignon and Pisa Vied for the Rule of Christendom (1969). A central question will be why an accomplished Bahá’í translator during the late 1960’s, a time of significant growth and prominence for the Faith, would focus her energies on the Fourteenth Century? This paper will argue that Gail’s medieval scholarship was not an avocation but rather united with her service to the Cause of God. In 1966, the Faith had only recently survived the death of the Guardian, passed through the Ministry of the Custodians, and elected the first Universal House of Justice. Therefore, issues of religious authority and legitimate succession would have understandably drawn Gail’s attention at that time. The Great Western Schism and Avignon Papacy provided precedents and object lessons on the consequences of challenged ecclesiastical successorship. Another motive for Gail in examining the crises of the Papacy may have also been the gentle insistence on the need for new religious authority in a new Revelation.
Next, this presentation will examine how Gail’s priorities as a Bahá’í on issues such as the equality of women and men guided her topics of inquiry as a historian of the emergence of modernity. For example, Life in the Renaissance foregrounds the role of women, highlights the consequences of religious fanaticism, and frames the Renaissance as the first stirrings of a new civilization. Her time spent in France, Austria, the Netherlands, England, Italy, and Spain travel-teaching and establishing Local Spiritual Assemblies during the Ten Year Crusade will be placed in comparison with the regions of focus in her medieval scholarship.
The paper will go on to consider the role of her medieval interests in her translation work. Was her version of The Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys informed by the religious allegories of the Middle Ages such as the Roman de la Rose as well as by Sufi accounts of spiritual ascent? As a woman who earned an MA in English from the University of California at Berkeley in 1932, it is highly probable that she studied such medieval allegories. In addition, this paper will note how her rendering into English of The Secret of Divine Civilization makes special mention of how Pope Sylvester II (c. 946-1003) studied in Islamic Andalucia and later discussed how Martin Luther challenged the Papacy.
The conclusion of the presentation will discuss the precedent and example set by Marzieh Gail for future scholarship of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance by Baháʼís and their community of interest. Considerations of methodology, periodization, and application will inform this discussion. To take one example, as a scholar proficient in English and French, as well as with Persian and Arabic and some Russian, Gail was ahead of her time in correlating Arabic sources with their reception in the Latin West. In so doing, she would have been in line with the guidance of Shoghi Effendi, who in a 1941 letter to an individual believer wrote that “the mission of the American Bahá’ís is, no doubt, to eventually establish the truth of Islam in the West…The spirit of Islam, no doubt, was the living germ of modern Civilization; which derived its impetus from the Islamic culture in the Middle Ages.” In framing the Middle Ages in Baháʼí historiography, Gail also made use of what Louse d’Arcens termed “medievalism,” the use of the premodern past as a counterpoint and foil to modernity and, here by extension, to the emerging world civilization which is the aim of the Baháʼí community.
James Russell is a historian of the book and of reading in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. He teaches World History as an Adjunct and Dual-Enrollment Instructor at Rio Salado College in Tempe, Arizona. James completed his doctorate at the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Durham University in the United Kingdom. He has worked as an educator at the secondary and post-secondary levels, and has also been an antiquarian bookseller. His research interests include the study of how the materiality of books shaped reading experiences in the age of early print, particularly as attested by readers’ notes, or marginalia.
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