Lock, Stock and Barrel: Story, Song, and Image in Early Modern Vaspurakan

Abstract:In the seventeenth century an artist painted guns in the hands of fifth-century soldiers at the Battle of Avarayr—an anachronistic interjection in the telling of a key moment of Armenia's history. This article discusses the utility of this image and the medium that hosted it—a small manuscript of religious songs and poems called the sharaknots‛—in order to understand the mechanisms by which Armenians physically reconstituted, virtually reimagined, and sensually revivified their own histories in the late-medieval and early modern periods. Despite its central role as a historical intermediary, the illuminated sharaknots‛ made no promises to deliver the realities of Armenian history through its textual and visual contents. This study traces how the sharaknots‛ managed to repackage both history and prose as religious song and ritual—refracting both through the lens of an evolving devotional apparatus. The illuminated sharaknots‛ remains an underexplored source of the Armenian condition on the eastern fringes of the Ottoman Empire. Using a single case study—Boston Public Library MS q Med.199—this article attempts to show how the sharaknots‛ became a receptacle of Armenian historical imagination and a critical contact zone between the past and the present by exploring the many levels of separation between battle, historical record, song, and image.