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Explores marriage, sexual relations, and family law in late antique Christianity using the writings of Ephrem the Syrian.
The series Studies and Texts in Scepticism contains monographs, translations, and collected essays exploring scepticism in its dual manifestation as a purely philosophical tradition and as a set of sceptical strategies, concepts, and attitudes in the cultural field - especially in religions, perhaps most notably in Judaism. In such cultural contexts scepticism manifests as a critical attitude towards different dimensions and systems of secular or revealed knowledge and towards religious and political authorities. It is not merely an intellectual or theoretical worldview, but a critical form of life that expresses itself in such diverse phenomena as religion, literature, and society. Further book series of the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies are Jewish Thought, Philosophy, and Religion and the Yearbook of the Maimonides Centre for Advances Studies.
Among the writers of the Syriac Christian tradition, none is as renowned as St. Ephrem of Nisibis (ca. 307?373), known to much of the later Christian world simply as "the Syrian." The great majority of Ephrem's works are poetry, with the madr??? ("teaching songs") especially prominent. This volume presents English translations of four complete madr??? cycles of Ephrem: On the Fast, On the Unleavened Bread, On the Crucifixion, and On the Resurrection. These collections include some of the most liturgically oriented songs in Ephrem's corpus, and, as such, provide a window into the celebration of Lent and Easter in the Syriac-speaking churches of northern Mesopotamia in the fourth century. Even...
The Iranian Talmud reexamines the Babylonian Talmud—one of Judaism's most central texts—in the light of Persian literature and culture, providing an unprecedented and accessible overview to the vibrant world of pre-Islamic Iran that shaped the Bavli.
Ephrem the Syrian was one of the founding voices in Syriac literature. While he wrote in a variety of genres, the bulk of his work took the form of madrashe, a Syriac genre of musical poetry or hymns. In Bible and Poetry in Late Antique Mesopotamia, Jeffrey Wickes offers a thoroughly contextualized study of Ephrem’s magnum opus, the Hymns on Faith, delivered in response to the theological controversies that followed the First Council of Nicaea. The ensuing doctrinal divisions had tremendous impact on the course of Christianity and led in part to the development of a uniquely Syriac Church, in which Ephrem would become a central figure. Drawing on literary, ritual, and performance theories, Bible and Poetry shows how Ephrem used the Syriac Bible to construct and conceive of himself and his audience. In so doing, Wickes resituates Ephrem in a broader early Christian context and contributes to discussions of literature and religion in late antiquity.
Analyzes audio recordings of interwar Hebrew plays, providing a new model for the use of sound in theater studies. Possessed Voices tells the intriguing story of a largely unknown collection of audio recordings, a valuable tool for understanding historical theater, which preserve performances of modernist interwar Hebrew plays. Seldom used in scholarship, Ruthie Abeliovich focuses on four recordings: a 1931 recording of The Eternal Jew (1919), a 1965 recording of The Dybbuk (1922), a 1961 radio play of The Golem (1925), and a 1952 radio play of Yaakov and Rachel (1928). Abeliovich traces the spoken language of modernist Hebrew theater as grounded in multiple modalities of expressive practice...
"Long-distance oceanic and overland trade along the Eurasian landmass in the 1400s was largely dominated by Chinese, Indian, and Arabic traders and predominantly conducted over short trajectories by sole traders or organized around small-scale enterprises. Yet, within two centuries of Europeans' arrival in the Indian Ocean in 1498, long-distance trade throughout Eurasia was mainly taken over by them. By 1700, they had formed new, large-scale, and impersonal organizations, primarily a joint-stock business corporation between English East India Company (EIC) and Dutch East India Company (VOC). This allowed them to transform trade from an enterprise dominated by many small traders moving goods ...
Shows how research and reflection on Jesus's Jewishness transforms contemporary Christian thought on memory, otherness, natality and law.
Focusing on travel narratives as a setting for spelling out both cultural exchanges and identity building, the present volume maps a variety of strategies employed in travelogues by Christians and Jews in the late antique Roman East. The first part sheds light on the shared cultural background – folkloric or mythic – reflected in late antique Jewish and Christian sea-travel stories, and the various attempts to adapt it to a specific religious agenda. While the comparative analysis of the sources from two textual communities emphasizes their different religious agendas, it also allows for restoring patterns of the broader background with which they converse. The second part highlights Christian perceptions of the Land of Israel in missionary enterprises and in the eschatological visions. The travelogues offer a window on the interplay between shared inheritance and new agendas within the dialectical development of religious traditions in Late Antiquity.
This book considers the great cultural and geopolitical changes in western Eurasia in the fifth century CE. It focuses on the Roman Empire, but it also examines the changes taking place in northern Europe, in Iran under the Sasanian Empire, and on the great Eurasian steppe. Attila is presented as a contributor to and a symbol of these transformations.