The Question of Literary Taste: A Close Look at the Court of al-???ib Ibn ?Abb?d Sociology of culture, and in particular the studies undertaken by Pierre Bourdieu, replaced the essentialist notion of taste long dominant in philosophical and literary aesthetics with a relational conception firmly tying taste to the dynamics of class inequalities. This important conceptual shift, rejecting the treatment of taste as spontaneous individual preferences and instead contextualizing and historicizing it to become inseparable from wider social groups and trends, has methodological implications beyond modern or Western societies, and is definitely pertinent to the study of medieval Arabic literature and literary criticism. This approach to taste (and the questions it yields) has not been adopted by scholars in the field. This may have to do with the tendency to study medieval literature literary criticism abstractly without attempting to connect them to the social settings of the era, for the fragmentary nature of the evidence and the difficulty of developing a suitable methodology. My paper is an attempt to demonstrate the importance of this approach through a proper test case. Al-???ib Ibn ?Abb?d (326-85/938-95) was a notable prose writer, poet and literary critic (among other things). The fact that besides possessing literary and linguistic competences he was also a vizier of two B?yid am?rs and a patron of one of the greatest courts in the 4th/10th century, in which poets and prose writers swarmed, raises several interesting issues connected with the question of taste: what was his personal literary taste and how was it connected with his social background? What bearings did it have on his protégés? Can we observe for the obvious power inequality an attempt on their part to adapt their production to his taste? If yes, what were the means by which he propagated his preferences to be adapted by the court poets? In brief, the conclusions reached show al-???ib’s taste as leaning to ‘natural’ (ma?b??) style in poetry while artful (or ‘artificial’: ma?n??) in prose, which is characteristic of his social group, namely, the secretaries (kutt?b); although the poets to a large extent respond to al-???ib’s preferred style, especially in formal events, the non-hegemonic artful style is still represented and poets known for it are co-opted. That indicates a non-dogmatic approach on the part of the patron, who despite his widely-known stylistic preferences does not pursue a rigid uncompromising selection, co-optation and evaluation processes.