Not without reason have courts in world history been associated with display and dissimulation. Grand-scale celebrations and festivities demonstrated the power of rulers to outsiders; salon-like settings invited servants, advisors, and entertainers to please the prince. A learned eighteenth-century observer referred to the court as a "theatre of ceremony"; likewise, a twentieth-century scholar of Baroque festivities presented the court as a great Welttheater. Recent research, moreover, has underlined that the court was an occasion as well as an institution: around a core group of people, a swath of occasional visitors flocked to the court, following a seasonal calendar usually including substantial movement. The court reconstituted itself frequently in very different settings. Finally, a strong current in the interpretation of court ritual stresses the impact of performance at court on political status. Not only could the performance of appropriate rites transform the heir into a legitimate ruler; rites permanently redefined political relationships. The trappings of the court, in this view, were always intimately connected to political power. In his work on Bali as a "theatre state," Clifford Geertz famously reversed a commonplace perception among scholars by stating that "power served pomp, not pomp power."
These concerns stand at the heart of this volume on Court and Performance in the Pre-Modern Middle East. The editors define the "pre-modern period" (3) as the seven centuries stretching from the Umayyad Caliphate to the Safavid and Ottoman empires. Their scope in time and place has considerable potential: it brings together more familiar examples such as the Byzantine, Umayyad, Abbasid, Mamluk, and Safavid courts, with a diversity of smaller 9-11th century Muslim princes and poets as well as a European literary fantasy of the Middle East, and, interestingly, Cyprus. The two editors, Evelyn Birge Vitz and Maurice A. Pomerantz, provide a clear and lively introduction, defining the volume's scope in time and place and clarifying their ideas about the court and the notion of performance. They approvingly cite Richard Schechner's seven functions of performance: "to entertain; to make something that is beautiful; to mark or change identity; to make or foster community; to heal; to teach, persuade, or convince; to deal with the sacred and/or demonic" (8). Surprisingly, Geertz's work on Muslim rulers in Morocco and South East Asia, a dominant influence in this field and cited by Schechner, is not referred to or included in the bibliography.
The twelve chapters of this volume are placed in four sections ("Power Performed," "Persuasion," "Entertainment," and "Delight") but the thematic unity of these sections is limited. Almost all contributions rely first and foremost on literary texts to hypothesize about performance at court. The balance between a careful reading of the texts and assumptions about performance differs considerably. Evelyn Birge Vitz, one of the two editors, opens the volume with an instructive and entertaining reading of a twelfth-century French fictive story about Charlemagne's travels to Jerusalem and Constantinople. Stavroula Constantinou continues with an examination of bloody punishments as described in Byzantine hagiography. She concludes that such texts should not be read as descriptions but as literary rewritings of earlier fictional accounts of torture and martyrs (33-34). The urban layout of Safavid Isfahan is expounded by Babak Rahimi. The author moves from the literary to the spatial and so brings us closer to performance, yet on the whole tells a familiar story. Louise Marlow, a leading authority on Muslim advice literature, opens the second section with a convincing overview that to some extent connects the texts to their actual social performance, the key ambition of the volume. The writer of numerous important contributions on the Abbasid court, Nadia Maria El Cheikh here considers the court as a majlis, the social gathering of the prince with his boon companions. From the literature she reconstructs a typology of the ideal courtier and connects this to Castiglione's work. Yet did this idealised typology ever approach the mundane practice at court? The question remains unasked here. The final contributor to this section, Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, describes the legacies of one Abbasid orator's preaching in later times. Examining the move from oral to written, he concludes that the stories written later embellished the plots and protagonists; they "do not so much tell us what happened in the courts but what was later thought to have happened there" (112).
The third section, on entertainment, opens with Margaret Mullet's chapter about stories "told in tents." A wide array of fascinating stories is cited, outlining "possible sources for the oral storytelling of a Komnenian court" (135). Maurice A. Pomerantz, co-editor of the volume, suggests the relevance of slips of the tongue in Abbasid court performance as reflected in the compilations of an eleventh-century Baghdadi writer, and connects this to Freud's view of slips. More concretely, Pomerantz points to the power differential and the patron-client relationship as formative for court poetry and its performance. Li Guo moves the reader to shadow performances at the Mamluk court, where one male player performed a variety of gender roles. Opening the final section on "delight," William Woys Weaver brings the reader to another field of performance, where texts are closely related to social practice: Cypriote court cuisine and its impact on cook books. Commendably, the author includes visual and material sources in his attempt to reconstruct the rich Cypriote culinary tradition. However, while the text is rich in assumptions, it remains rather thin in references and substantiations. The final two contributors, Bilal Orfali and Jocelyn Sharlet, deal with the reframing of earlier love poetry by Sufi mystics and Abbasid literati respectively.
The two editors conclude by reviewing some commonalities suggested by the materials presented. They stress the potential of texts to illuminate performance at court and highlight the movement and variability of courts--a relevant but somewhat unsurprising assertion. They then single out three issues: 1) performativity, or in their words: "performers [...] typically attempt to make something happen" (244); 2) danger, the risks of performing in the proximity of the prince; and 3) transgressivity, the possibility of bending rules and criticizing through performance. These outcomes reflect long-standing interpretations, and to some extent even clichés of court life. Indeed, while most of the contributions show sound scholarship, the volume as a whole fails to convince. The key ambition, to connect literary texts to court performance, is dealt with haphazardly. On the whole, literary texts determine and restrict the perspective of the authors. This can readily be accepted where contributors (Vitz, Constantinou) carefully state that their reading of texts cannot say much about actual social practice, yet it raises concerns where authors seem to assume connections between texts and social practice without making a consistent effort to trace them. This attitude prevails in the contributions, though it remains mostly implicit. The texts discussed, however, may have reflected topoi of literary traditions rather than life at court. Some attention is paid to the writing down of oral traditions, as well as to the origins and persistence of such traditions, yet remarks about the likely conditions of advisors, poets, or singers in the proximity of kings remain the exception.
Perhaps this criticism reflects the background of this reviewer in early modern history, where sources are available in greater variety. Indeed, in recent decades the narrowly literary view of courts, inferred from Castiglione, Saint-Simon, and many other writers, has been subjected to rigorous revision on the basis of sources closer to daily practice at the royal household. An equally rich and varied mass of sources cannot be found for most of the courts discussed in In the Presence of Power. However a more careful reading of recent scholarship dealing with similar themes but using a greater variety of sources could have helped the editors and contributors to handle their important endeavour with greater acuity and precision. Restoring performances at court through texts, music, spaces, dress, and artefacts is a daunting challenge, but it can yield significant historical insights: we know that kings, courtiers, and distant audiences were formed by ephemeral collective performances, festive and solemn, daily and exceptional. The view deriving from literary texts threatens to transform this lively and changing social environment into a tableau vivant of well-known roles: the absolute prince, the suave boon companion, the scheming courtier, the wise advisor, and the honest jester.
This volume lacks the vigour and coherence to serve as a statement in the field and is unlikely to attract a wider audience. Yet it will find readers among specialists of the courts and texts discussed, who are familiar with the terminology and will appreciate the materials presented.