Tobunken Seminar/ASPS Gilas Seminar “Medieval Arabic and Persian Mirrors for Princes: Cultures of Political Advice in Islamicate Contexts”

Speaker: Professor Louise Marlow (Wellesley College)

Lecture Title: Medieval Arabic and Persian Mirrors for Princes: Cultures of Political Advice in Islamicate Contexts (abstract below)

Date and Time: December 19, 2018 (Wed), 18:00-19:30

Venue: Room 001, Sanjo Conference Hall, Hongo Campus, University of Tokyo

Abstract:
Like numerous other pre-modern agrarian societies, many of the ‘Islamicate’ societies that stretched from the Atlantic coasts of Spain and North Africa in the west to South and Central Asia in the east produced substantial literatures of political advice. Often referred to in modern scholarship as Fürstenspiegel or ‘mirrors for princes’, such writings offered advice on the ethical and practical aspects of governance for contemporary rulers, to whom they were usually also dedicated. Implicit in the act of advising is the assumption that the advisee stands to benefit from the advice, and the mirror literatures encompass a delicate paradox: what were the parameters and limits of the socio-cultural terrain within which an author could give advice to the ruler on whose favour and patronage he also depended? Taking a small number of examples from the Arabic and Persian mirror literatures of the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, this presentation explores some of the ways in which writer-counsellors and ruler-recipients negotiated this ill-defined and unstable terrain. With reference to the literary characteristics, the political messages and the social functions of mirrors in Islamicate courtly cultures of the Middle Period, the presentation offers examples of how a literary genre that exhibits a marked consistency, even in matters of detail, across vast expanses of time and space also responded closely to the conditions and exigencies of specific historical contexts and particular writer-ruler relationships.


(PDF: 600KB)

This event is open to the public and no registration is required.
Contact person: Kazuo Morimoto (morikazu[at]ioc.u-tokyo.ac.jp)