Looking at the JIRA Python API code, it appears that if I call jira.search_issues with expand='renderedFields', it should return a renderedFields object, similar to the fields object, but with fields such as "description" converted from wiki markup to HTML.

Examining issue.raw, I see that renderedFields is empty. This appears to be a bug, unless I'm not understanding how to make this work properly.

Note that I can work around this by retrieving the issue key in my query result and then using jira.issue(key, expand='renderedFields'). So there's a reasonable work-around, but it would be nice if jira.search_issues handled this without the extra step.