The essays collected in this volume highlight some of the regimes of thought and changing trends that structure the field of Islamic art history. The authors present new research exploring the intentions of patrons, the agency of craftsmen, and their responses to previous artistic production, thereby allowing artifacts and monuments to be set within their historical, social, and artistic contexts.

In their contributions, Annabel Teh Gallop, Dmitry Bondarev, and Umberto Bongianino discuss significant changes to Qur'an production due to dynastic and political regime changes in Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, as well as in Borno and Morocco in Africa. Corinne Mühlemann looks at changes in the role and status of designers and weavers making silk in Khurasan in the post-Mongol period. Lisa Golombek, Michael Chagnon, and Farshid Emami explore Safavid art and architecture, focusing on the material and sensorial qualities of a group of tiled arch panels tiles with narrative scenes, a delicately painted vase, and the clocks of the main square of seventeenth-century Isfahan. Regime change also comes about through technological shifts, and Ulrich Marzolph and Yasemin Gencer ask how the rise of photography and new printing techniques shaped the production, exchange, and transmission of images in Iran and Turkey.