A fresh analysis of that sheds new light on the Psalms of Solomon

Researchers whose work focuses on the Psalms of Solomon, experts on the Septuagint, and scholars of Jewish Hellenistic literature take a fresh look at debates surrounding the text. Authors engage linguistic, historical, and theological issues including the original language of the psalms, their historical setting, and their theological intentions with the goal of expanding our understanding of first-century BCE Jewish theology.

Features:

• New methods applied to open questions of authorship and historical context
• Focusd scholarly attention on a work of theological and literary importance
• Revised essays originally presented at the First International Meeting on the Psalms of Solomon

Explore new approaches to the Psalms of Solomon

The Psalms of Solomon: Texts, Contexts, and Intertexts explores a unique pseudepigraphal document that bears witness to the 63 BCE Roman conquest of Jerusalem. Essays address a variety of themes, notably their political, social, religious, and historical contexts, through the lens of anthropology of religion, cognitive science, socioeconomic theory, and more. Contributors include Kenneth Atkinson, Eberhard Bons, Johanna Erzberger, Angela Kim Harkins, G. Anthony Keddie, Patrick Pouchelle, Stefan Schreiber, Shani Tzoref, and Rodney A. Werline.

Solomon and Marcolf is known for being both important and mysterious. It pits wise Solomon, famous from the Bible, against a wily peasant named Marcolf. One of its two parts is a dialogue, in which the king and jester, sage and fool, prophet and blasphemer bandy back and forth questions and comments. Whereas Solomon is solemn and pompous, Marcolf resorts to low language and earthy topics. The other part comprises twenty short chapters in which Marcolf tricks Solomon time and again. These episodes are as impudent and scatological as is the dialogue. Together, the two parts constitute a rudimental prose novel or “rogue biography.”

Cited by Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World, Solomon and Marcolf is widely known by name. But until now it has not been translated into any modern language. The present volume offers an introduction, followed by the Latin and English, detailed commentary, and reproductions of woodcut illustrations from the 1514 edition. Appendixes help readers understand the origins and influence of a work that was composed around 1200, that attained its greatest popularity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and that has the potential still today to delight and instruct.

The Latin prose Solomon and Marcolf, enigmatic in origins, has been a puzzle from long before the sixteenth-century French author François Rabelais through the twentieth-century Russian critic Bakhtin to today. Though often called a dialogue, the second of its two parts comprises a rudimentary novel with twenty episodes. In 2009 the “original” received at last an edition and translation with commentary as the first volume in the Harvard Studies in Medieval Latin series.

Solomon and Marcolf: Vernacular Traditions, the fourth volume in the series, displays the mysteries of the tradition. Solomon relates to the biblical king, but did Marcolf originate in Germanic or Eastern regions? Here lovers of literature and folklore may explore, in English for the first time, relevant texts, from the twelfth through the early eighteenth century. These astonishingly varied and fascinating pieces, from Iceland in the North and West through Russia in the East and Italy in the South, have been translated from medieval and early modern French, Russian, German, Icelandic, Danish, and Italian. The book opens with snapshots of two nineteenth-century polymaths, the Englishman John M. Kemble and Russian Aleksandr Veselovskii, whose hypotheses can now be evaluated. An appendix documents awareness of Solomon and Marcolf in late medieval and early modern times.

The Latin prose Solomon and Marcolf, enigmatic in origins, has been a puzzle from long before the sixteenth-century French author François Rabelais through the twentieth-century Russian critic Bakhtin to today. Though often called a dialogue, the second of its two parts comprises a rudimentary novel with twenty episodes. In 2009 the “original” received at last an edition and translation with commentary as the first volume in the Harvard Studies in Medieval Latin series.

Solomon and Marcolf: Vernacular Traditions, the fourth volume in the series, displays the mysteries of the tradition. Solomon relates to the biblical king, but did Marcolf originate in Germanic or Eastern regions? Here lovers of literature and folklore may explore, in English for the first time, relevant texts, from the twelfth through the early eighteenth century. These astonishingly varied and fascinating pieces, from Iceland in the North and West through Russia in the East and Italy in the South, have been translated from medieval and early modern French, Russian, German, Icelandic, Danish, and Italian. The book opens with snapshots of two nineteenth-century polymaths, the Englishman John M. Kemble and Russian Aleksandr Veselovskii, whose hypotheses can now be evaluated. An appendix documents awareness of Solomon and Marcolf in late medieval and early modern times.