Courts and Performance in the Premodern Middle East (Day 1)

In bringing together leading scholars and performers of the Abbasid, Byzantine, Fatimid, Crusader, Jewish, Persianate, and Ottoman traditions, this conference seeks to engage three major themes: the power of patronage to affect and inflect performance modes in comparison with other settings; the ways court performers express emotion and invite emotional response in their audiences; and how performance often blurs the line between oral and written traditions.