Imperial grimoires—that is, manuals on various forms of magic and divination written for or commissioned by royal readers—proliferated across the early modern Persianate world, more than paralleling the (decidedly non-imperial) grimoire boom in Renaissance Europe; but only the latter has been studied to date. This programmatic essay diagnoses the colonialist-Orientalist causes for this wild imbalance in comparative early modern Western intellectual and imperial historiography and outlines a philological way forward. Far from being evidence for “the superstition of the Moslem natives,” such manuals are an indispensable aperture onto precisely those processes—common to Islamdom and Christendom alike—by which we define Western early modernity: textualization, canonization, standardization, confessionalization, centralization, imperialization, bureaucratization, democratization, and mathematization. Yet they also record the religio-cultural and institutional divergences that so distinguish the Islamicate and especially Persianate experience of early modernity from the Latin Christianate.

帝国的命令书，即由皇家读者编写或委托的有关各种形式的魔法和占卜的手册，在整个现代波斯时代迅速蔓延，远远超过了欧洲文艺复兴时期（绝对是非帝国的）命令书的繁荣。但迄今为止，仅对后者进行了研究。这篇程序性论文诊断了殖民主义-东方主义者在相对早期的现代西方知识史和帝国史学中造成这种巨大不平衡的原因，并概述了前进的语言学方法。这些手册远不是“穆斯林本地人的迷信”的证据，而是精确地描述了伊斯兰早期和基督教世界的那些过程的必不可少的一环，在这些过程中，我们定义了西方早期现代性：文本化，正典化，标准化、,悔化，集中化，帝国化 官僚化，民主化和数学化。然而，他们还记录了宗教文化和制度上的分歧，从而使伊斯兰教徒，尤其是波斯人的近代早期经历与拉丁基督教徒有所区别。