Advice literature, a popular genre in both the medieval Islamic world and Christian Europe, is eminently amenable to comparative study since interest in the mores and manners of political rule cuts across boundaries. Furthermore, a growing number of recent studies have detailed shared elements of content and form including topics and anecdotes, as well as a defined range of exemplars drawn from late antiquity and before. Yet, as Enrico Boccaccini notes early on in his Reflecting Mirrors, East and West, in spite of the apparent topical and structural similarities between Islamic and Christian mirrors, there is scant evidence for contact between the two traditions. His solution is to discard a geographical or civilizational divide imposed by “colonial regimes of knowledge” (p. 8) and “imagine mirrors as a single transcultural and transepochal phenomenon with contested origins or sources” (p. 19) that engage with the education of rulers (p. 5).
The bold methodological move – an imagined transcultural phenomenon – is justified by the “paradigmatic framework of an inclusive Late Antiquity”, that decentralizes the West and humanizes the Islamic world by immersing both in the same melting pot. Therefore, rather than striving for a more nuanced explanation for similar contents in dissimilar contexts in the absence of evidence for actual contact between various historiographical traditions, the transcultural approach obviates the very need to premise these similarities on any mode of transmission, exchange, cross-pollination or even parthenogenesis.
A long theoretical introduction is followed by another lengthy discussion on the two historiographical traditions that have conjured up a divide between Islamic and Christian mirrors for princes. Chapter 2 introduces the four mirrors selected for comparison, chosen for the way they illuminate various stages in the development of the two traditions and because they emanate from periods of crisis: ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd's Risāla is paired with the Carolingian De institutione, and al-Ghazzālī's Persian Naṣiḥat al-mulūk with the thirteenth-century Spanish Castigos e documentos para bien vivir. Chapter 3 examines the advice proffered in the four mirrors, and chapter 4 dwells on the advisors, their relationship with the ruling prince, and their strategies for delivering advice. The conclusion summarizes the contents, with a brief description of an alternative typology for classifying mirrors based on form, intra- and extratextual constellations, and scope (pp. 252–4).
Boccaccini hopes to free mirrors from their broad context and focus instead on what they may reveal of their immediate context, adopting a hybrid model suggested by Sebastian Günther, while acknowledging its difficulties (pp. 67–8). Instead of a religious denominator to refer to a civilization or a narrative tradition, he calls for narrower categories such as Carolingian or Saljuq that produce a more precise typology (p. 252). But if crisis, a political matter, is the impetus for flowering mirrors and travelling concepts of legitimacy (p. 21), then surely an approach that emphasizes the ideational context – the concerns of the thinkers of the time – rather than extratextual considerations, such as whether the author was commissioned or the mirror had a specific dedicatee, is preferable. For if fully localized, then historical context vanishes completely, as there is hardly a political crisis that defies the universal template of a failing prince challenged by a slew of contenders. And at the end of the day, even with immensely popular and widespread mirrors such as the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum, “not a single instance is found where the evidence even partially supports the claim that the text influenced a ruler's policy or behavior”, as argued by Steven J. Williams (“Giving advice and taking it: the reception by rulers of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum as a speculum princips”, in Consilium: Teoire e patriche del consigliare nella cultura medeivale, ed. Carla Casagrande, Chiara Crisciani and Silvana Vecchio (Florence: Sismel, 2004), pp. 139–80).
The rhetorical foundation and polemical representation of the past in medieval narratives, a staple of contemporary studies, is repeated throughout Reflecting Mirrors, East and West without taking full account of its ramifications. For a study that places so much stock on emphasizing methodological and theoretical rigour, the historical narrative that provides the crisis to which the mirrors are said to respond is seldom exposed to critical inquiry. Gendered advice is a case in point. Boccaccini writes, or cites approvingly, that women in advice literature reflect the faltering rationality of men (p. 228) and are a stand-in for procurers of self-interest and bad advice that destabilize the polity (pp. 228–9), but also declares for the positivist surmise that the genre was exploited at times by authors who sought to remove the wives and mothers of rulers from the political arena, citing as an example of a direct causal connection the rivalry between an eleventh-century Saljuq vizier and the machinations of the sultan's exceptionally powerful wife (pp. 229–30).
In fact, the very form of advice – imparted by a giver distanced from its recipient – and its frequent deployment in spite of its uncontested inefficacy, should suffice to alert the judicious reader to take heed of what lies between the lines. Considered as trope, advice also resists generic categorization (p. 51). How such novel typologies enhance our understanding of mirrors as refractors of political crisis remains unresolved.
These theoretical qualms aside, there is much to recommend in this study. The author offers a particularly thoughtful analysis of al-Jāḥiẓ and Machiavelli on what distinguished advice literature as works providing instruction on matters of government (pp. 49–51), and a calibrated reading of the nuances of justice in various mirrors (pp. 118–38). An impressive amount of learning is imparted in those sections (chapters 2, 3, and 4) that offer a close reading of the selected mirrors and cognate texts. However, much of what is new and original in Reflecting Mirrors is buried under endless references to artificial boundaries and devising new taxonomies that, in spite of vigorous protestations to the contrary, have their own limitations and drawbacks.
