Connected history of court societies

The six lectures in 2014-15 (two in March, then four in June 2015) drew their inspiration from several sources: the work of sociologist Norbert Elias (1897-1990) on the morphology of courtly societies in the West; the research of various historians of the modern era dealing with the question of "encounters" between distant peoples; my own earlier writings on travel narratives in the Iberian and Persian-speaking worlds; and reflections by both historians and anthropologists around the question of "incommensurability" (or not) between cultures.