Introduction -- Power performed. Performance and competition of kingship and court in Le voyage de Charlemagne a Jerusalem et a Constantinople : real and imaginary encounters between the medieval West and the Middle East / Evelyn Birge Vitz -- Bloodthirsty emperors : performances of imperial punishment in Byzantine hagiography / Stavroula Constantinou -- Maydan-i naqsh-i jahan : the Safavid Isfahan public square as "a playing field" / Babak Rahimi -- Persuasion. Performances of advice and admonition in the courts of Muslim rulers of the ninth-eleventh centuries / Louise Marlow -- Conversation as performance : adab al-muhĐadatha at the Abbasid court / Nadia Maria El Cheikh -- Khalid ibn SĐafwan : an orator at the Umayyad and Abbasid courts / Jaakko Hameen-Anttila -- Entertainment. Performing court literature in medieval Byzantium : tales told in tents / Margaret Mullett -- Error and the Abbasid performer : the "rare slips" of the fifth/eleventh-century / Ghars al-Nima al-SĐabiơ / Maurice A. Pomerantz -- Cross-gender "acting" and gender-bending rhetoric at a princely party : performing shadow plays in Mamluk Cairo / Li Guo -- Delight. The court cuisine of medieval Cyprus : food as table theater / William Woys Weaver -- Mystical poetics : courtly themes in early Sufi akhbar / Bilal Orfali -- Chaste lovers, Umayyard rulers, and Abbasid writers / Jocelyn Sharlet -- Epilogue / Evelyn Birge Vitz and Maurice A. Pomerantz.
Summary:
In recent decades, scholars have produced much new research on courtly life in medieval Europe, but studies on imperial and royal courts across the Middle East have received much less attention, particularly for courts before 1500AD. In the Presence of Power, however, sheds new light on courtly life across the region. This insightful, exploratory collection of essays uncovers surprising commonalities across a broad swath of cultures. The pre-modern period in this volume includes roughly seven centuries, opening with the first dynasty of Islam, the Umayyads, whose reign marked an important watershed for Late Antique culture, and closing with the rule of the so-called "gunpowder" empires of the Ottomans and Safavids over much of the Near East in the sixteenth century. In between, this volume locates similarities across the Western Medieval, Byzantine and Islamicate courtly cultures, spanning a vast history and geography to demonstrate the important cross-pollinations that occurred between their literary and cultural legacies. This study does not presume the presence of one shared courtly institution across time and space, but rather seeks to understand the different ways in which contemporaries experienced and spoke about these places of power and performance. Adopting a very broad view of performances, In the Presence of Power includes exuberant expressions of love in Arabic stories, shadow plays in Mamluk Cairo, Byzantine storytelling, religious food traditions in Christian Cyprus, advice, and political and ethnographic performances of power.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.