The literary genre of shrine visitation guides (kitāb al-ziyārat or kitāb al-mazārāt), highlighting the important merits (fażā’il) of a city and deceased saintly figures whose shrines ennoble the city, were extremely popular texts in 14th and 15th century Iran and Central Asia. However, like many Persian texts of the late medieval period, they defy easy categorization into distinct literary genres. Instead, the structure, content, and tone of Timurid shrine visitation guides give evidence to their connections to other literary genres. This paper will analyze how and why shrine guides employed elements of these other genres of literary writing—the historical, the hagiographic, the legalistic, and the folkloric—in creating something to both entertain and inform diverse audiences of pilgrims. Shrine visitation guides developed from a long tradition of local histories and made use of many structural aspects of these histories. The biographical focus, discussion of local events, and praising of a city’s unique qualities found in local histories remained an important part of shrine visitation guides. However, these texts expanded into new literary directions over time. The guides became much more hagiographic in content, including detailed descriptions of the lives of both local and non-local saints in ways that mirror the Sufi tażkira. Shrine guides also came to incorporate sections on the proper ritual practice necessary to effectively make pilgrimage to shrines of the holy dead. The articulation of proper ritual practice employed legalistic language, though in a simplified form, and borrowed from more scholarly works of fiqh. Furthermore, the stories of miraculous events contained within the shrine guides often evoked the riveting qiṣṣa, or prose tales of the medieval storyteller. This paper also argues that the audience of shrine guides was broader than the audiences of the other literary genres discussed above. This focus on audience and reception, alongside a discussion of the literary elements that make up shrine guides, moves the narrative of the shrine guide beyond a narrow textual analysis. By making use of a literary approach to the construction of Timurid shrine visitation guides and making clear the porous nature of genre boundaries, this paper will illustrate how medieval audiences might have understood and received these shrine guides.