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At the intersection of Jewish studies and linguistic research, the essays assembled in this book approach the topic of the languages of Sephardic Jews from different perspectives, spanning chronologically from the Middle Ages to the present day. Drawing on diverse sources – from medical glossaries to inquisition archives, from rabbinic responsa to recordings of today's speakers – the scholars collaborating on this project have endeavoured to reconstruct fragments of a complex and elusive linguistic reality, which over the centuries has been shaped by the historical experience of its speakers. An innovative collection of rigorously conducted synchronic and diachronic studies that contributes to expanding our knowledge and opening new perspectives on crucial issues, such as the effects of contact on the linguistic structures, the possibility of a norm for polycentric languages, the relationship between the lexicon of a language and the vitality of its speech community.
A history of early modern libraries and the imperial desire for total knowledge. Medieval scholars imagined the library as a microcosm of the world, but as novel early modern ways of managing information facilitated empire in both the New and Old Worlds, the world became a projection of the library. In The Librarian’s Atlas, Seth Kimmel offers a sweeping material history of how the desire to catalog books coincided in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the aspiration to control territory. Through a careful study of library culture in Spain and Morocco—close readings of catalogs, marginalia, indexes, commentaries, and maps—Kimmel reveals how the booklover’s dream of a comprehensive and well-organized library shaped an expanded sense of the world itself.
This manual provides a detailed presentation of the various Romance languages as they appear in texts written by Jews, mostly using the Hebrew alphabet. It gives a comprehensive overview of the Jews and the Romance languages in the Middle Ages (part I), as well as after the expulsions (part II). These sections are dedicated to Judaeo-Romance texts and linguistic traditions mainly from Italy, northern and southern France (French and Occitan), and the Iberian Peninsula (Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese). The Judaeo-Spanish varieties of the 20th and 21st centuries are discussed in a separate section (part III), due to the fact that Judaeo-Spanish can be considered an independent language. This section includes detailed descriptions of its phonetics/phonology, morphology, lexicon, and syntax.
The untold story of the greatest library of the Renaissance and its creator Hernando Colón This engaging book offers the first comprehensive account of the extraordinary projects of Hernando Colón, son of Christopher Columbus, which culminated in the creation of the greatest library of the Renaissance, with ambitions to be universal––that is, to bring together copies of every book, on every subject and in every language. Pérez Fernández and Wilson-Lee situate Hernando’s projects within the rapidly changing landscape of early modern knowledge, providing a concise history of the collection of information and the origins of public libraries, examining the challenges he faced and the solutions he devised. The two authors combine “meticulous research with deep and original thought,” shedding light on the history of libraries and the organization of knowledge. The result is an essential reference text for scholars of the early modern period, and for anyone interested in the expansion and dissemination of information and knowledge.
What cities were there in early 16th-century Spain? With how many inhabitants? Were they fortified? And how many leagues apart were they? Those are the questions that Ferdinand Columbus tried to answer in his Vocabulary containing the names of the places and kingdoms of Spain. The present edition reconstructs the "cosmographic" endeavor of Christopher Columbus’ youngest son based on two codices from the Biblioteca Capitular y Colombina of Seville.