This dissertation is a study of a set of stories grouped under the generic term ʿishqiyah maṡnavī or romance poem, told and retold in Persian, Dakhni, and Urdu from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. Featuring tragically-separated lovers who go on a quest to find each other while fighting supernatural obstacles, the tales are allegories for the Sufi quest for God. With reference to the Madhumalati story and other stories with an overlapping set of plot points, the dissertation argues that genre was defined materially, through the physical form of the texts and the ways in which people interacted with them in gatherings. These aspects, in conversation with the discursive content of the texts, cued audiences to respond to the Sufi allegory that underpinned the works. This study offers two main contributions to the study of Sufi romance literature: working with a multilingual archive; and taking a material approach to the texts. Examining multilingual manuscripts and composite codices, the dissertation traces how stories moved between different languages through translations, and across space through physical books, recitations and gatherings. These were also “moving stories” in the transitive sense, with the capacity to move their reader-listener-viewers emotionally. The dissertation shows how manuscripts offer evidence of performance and recitation practices in which reader-listener-viewers were invited to make connections between the text and music or painting. This allowed the works to be understood as a special kind of genre to be approached as an allegory, with the sensory elements of its recitation heightening emotions that were meant to be directed towards God. The genre was maintained through movement among languages, books and people, in an intimate social world in which poets cited each other, corrected each other, memorialized each other, and sometimes chose to exclude each other. When the books ceased circulating in assemblies and became objects of individual study in libraries and schools, readers lost the affective relationships that had animated the texts. This helps explain the relative lack of success of ʿishqiyah maṡnavīs in the age of print.