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'His Pen and Ink are a Powerful Mirror' is a volume of collected essays in honor of Ross Brann, written by his students and friends on the occasion of his 70th birthday. The essays engage with a diverse range of Andalusi and Mediterranean literature, art, and history. Each essay begins from the organic hybridity of Andalusi literary and cultural history as its point of departure, introduce new texts, ideas, and objects into the disciplinary conversation or radically reassesses well-known ones, and represent the theoretical, methodological, and material impacts Brann has had and continues to have on the study of the literature and culture of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in al-Andalus. Contributors include: Ali Humayn Akhtar, Esperanza Alfonso, Peter Cole, Jonathan Decter, Elisabeth Hollender, Uriah Kfir, S.J. Pearce, F.E. Peters, Arturo Prats, Cynthia Robinson, Tova Rosen, Aurora Salvatierra, Raymond P. Scheindlin, Jessica Streit, David Torollo.
Throughout history, different cultural traditions, all of them with considerable linguistic diversity, have flourished and converged in the Mediterranean and Near Eastern regions. The International Conference of Junior Researchers in Mediterranean and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures provided a transverse and interdisciplinary framework of discussion and reflection on the intellectual and cultural production of the Mediterranean and the Near East, from its earliest stages to the present. This book is the result of the analysis of the different political, religious and social trends of thought, material culture, and artistic, literary and linguistic expressions brought together in this geographical area, highlighting the scope of this blend of traditions within different space-time surroundings.
This groundbreaking new work is the first full critical edition and English translation of the Hebrew book Sefer ha-Pardes [The Book of the Orchard], written at the end of the thirteenth century by the Provençal Jewish author Jedaiah ha-Penini. It is purportedly an example of musar: a compilation of wise epigrams and meshalim [parables] that teach moral lessons on different topics, such as the service of God, friendship, the deceitfulness of the world, medicine, logic, music, magic, and poetry. However, it is in reality a compendium of sayings that reveal the author’s personal views and feelings on a variety of religious topics, secular sciences, and their practitioners. David Torollo pre...
In Creating the Mediterranean: Maps and the Islamic Imagination Tarek Kahlaoui treats the subject of the Islamic visual representations of the Mediterranean. It tracks the history of the Islamic visualization of the sea from when geography was created by the Islamic state’s bureaucrats of the tenth century C.E. located mainly in the central Islamic lands, to the later men of the field, specifically the sea captains from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries C.E. located in the western Islamic lands. A narrative has emerged from this investigation in which the metamorphosis of the identity of the author or mapmaker seemed to be changing with the rest of the elements that constitute the identity of a map: its reader or viewer, its style and structure, and its textual content.
Religious and Intellectual Diversity in the Islamicate World and Beyond is a collection of essays in honor of Sarah Stroumsa, an eminent scholar who through the years has embodied and advanced the possibility of collaboration across borders. The volume is presented to her by scholars working on the study of the intellectual history of the Middle Ages, the intercultural contact and migration of knowledge in the Islamic world, and many other topics. Contributors: Binyamin Abrahamov, Camilla Adang, Anna Ayse Akasoy, Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann, Meir M. Bar-Asher, José Bellver, Menachem Ben-Sasson, Haggai Ben-Shammai, Glen W. Bowersock, Rémi Brague, Godefroid de Callataÿ, Jonathan Decter, Mic...
Living with the Law explores the marital disputes of Jews in medieval Islamic Egypt (1000-1250), relating medieval gossip, marital woes, and the voices of men and women of a world long gone. Probing the rich documents of the Cairo Geniza, a unique repository of discarded paper discovered in Cairo synagogue, the book recovers the life stories of Jewish women and men working through their marital problems at home, with their families, in the streets of old Cairo and in Jewish and Muslim courts. Despite a voluminous literature on Jewish law, the everyday practice of Jewish courts has only recently begun to be investigated systematically. The experiences of those at a legal, social, and cultural...
The Bible in the Bowls represents a complete catalogue of Hebrew Bible quotations found in the published corpus of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic magic bowls. As our only direct epigraphic witnesses to the Hebrew Bible from late antique Babylonia, the bowls are uniquely placed to contribute to research on the (oral) transmission of the biblical text in late antiquity; the pre-Masoretic Babylonian vocalisation tradition; the formation of the liturgy and the early development of the Jewish prayer book; the social locations of biblical knowledge in late antique Babylonia and socio-religious typologies of the bowls; and the dynamics of scriptural citation in ancient Jewish magic. In a number of cases...
Throughout the last two centuries, Hebrew metrics was studied by leading linguists and specialists in medieval Hebrew poetry. Nowadays, it has disappeared from the academic discussion such that it is sometimes even difficult to find scansions or the name of the meter in new editions of poems. This book aims to rectify this gap, helping readers to understand the metric structure of this poetry in order to facilitate the work of editing and cataloguing those samples still in manuscript form for future editors. Delgado presents his view of Andalusi Hebrew metrics, as encountered in medieval manuals of Arabic and Hebrew metrics and scattered notes in the works of Andalusi Hebrew philologists. Wh...
This book reveals the medieval Mediterranean region as a richly nuanced space of places and peoples connected by a body of water, but far from unified—and seeks to challenge what we think we know about the medieval Mediterranean and the world it influenced. Reflective of the diversity of the Mediterranean region, the contributors are an international body of scholars that bring together topics that are seemingly disparate but are in fact in a vibrant conversation with one another. The volume seeks to shed new light and perspectives on familiar topics. Each chapter begins with secondary commentary for context, and is followed by primary sources comprised of images and texts that invite care...
This volume brings together papers on topics relating to the transmission of the Hebrew Bible from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern period. We refer to this broadly in the title of the volume as the ‘Masoretic Tradition’. The papers are innovative studies of a range of aspects of this Masoretic tradition at various periods, many of them presenting hitherto unstudied primary sources. They focus on traditions of vocalisation signs and accent signs, traditions of oral reading, traditions of Masoretic notes, as well as Rabbinic and exegetical texts. The contributors include established scholars of the field and early-career researchers.