Nostalgia for a Unified Realm
271
medieval precedent and extended into the exercise of other types of
intellectual authority.
92
If the elite were “backward-looking” in their
“search for solutions to novel problems in ancient texts and precedents”
with regard to land administration,
93
it is not much of a stretch to imag-
ine that this orientation could have easily pertained to the inherently
political project of textually ordering the past, too. In a climate such as
this, casting the past as a
Mirror
becomes an unsurprising move, one that
could have been a gesture with multiple meanings. Revisiting the framing
of history as a
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