Funding Source: National Endowment for the Humanities – ‘Mirrors for princes’ – writings that offer advice to rulers on their governance and comportment – are attested for virtually all pre-modern agrarian societies. Pre-modern Muslim societies produced numerous examples of the genre, written first in Arabic, and later in Persian, Turkish and Urdu, across a terrain that stretched from Spain to South and Central Asia. Written by secretaries and administrators, historians, men of letters, religious scholars, jurists and judges, mirrors shed considerable light on the political and intellectual cultures in which they were produced and to which their authors responded. They complement and sometimes subvert other modes of political discourse, such as legal writings, philosophical treatises, historiography and panegyric poetry, with which they also intersect. This project will prepare an anthology that will present, in English translation, important texts drawn from the medieval Arabic and Persian ‘mirrors for princes’. The anthology will also provide a substantial introduction to the genre, in which I situate the selected textual examples in their historical as well as literary contexts.