Results by title

 

When Joseph Joffo was ten years old, his father gave him and his brother fifty francs and instructions to flee Nazi-occupied Paris and, somehow, get to the south where France was free. A Bag of Marbles tells that remarkable and engaging story, bringing to life the dangers facing these two Jewish boys as they eluded the Nazis and made their way, against all odds, to safety. A captivating and unforgettable story that will reward readers young and old, A Bag of Marbles is presented here with an afterword by the author in which he responds to questions that students asked about his experience over the years.

This story collection is a welcome port of entry for any reader not yet familiar with Marguerite Yourcenar’s works.

Published to great acclaim in France in 1993, this collection is not only a delight for Marguerite Yourcenar fans but a welcome port of entry for any reader not yet familiar with the author's lengthier, more demanding works. This collection includes three stories written between 1927 and 1930 when the author was in her mid-twenties. These stories cover a range of themes, from an allegory on greed and a scene from the war of the sexes to a witch hunt that obsessively creates its own quarry.

For the devoted readers of Yourcenar, this collection allows a rare glimpse at the beginnings of a writer's craft. In these accomplished but forgotten pieces, edited and introduced by her biographer, Josyane Savigneau, readers will find the blend of fable and fairy tale of Oriental Tales, the psychological chronicle of Dear Departed, and the ironic realism of A Coin in Nine Hands. Read as an introduction to Yourcenar's work, the stories take us into the writer's workshop, as it were, to the early days of creation. A Blue Tale and Other Stories carries the unmistakable voice of a formidable and vastly talented writer.

Marguerite Yourcenar (her pseudonym was an anagram of her family name, Crayencour) was born in Brussels in 1903 and died in Maine in 1987. One of the most respected writers in the French language, she is best known as the author of the acclaimed Memoirs of Hadrian and The Abyss. She was awarded many literary honors, most notably election to the Académie Française in 1980, the first woman so honored.

The University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library has become one of the most celebrated libraries in the world, boasting a collection of nearly twelve million books and manuscripts and a fascinating history that spans more than four hundred years.
           
A Brief History of the Bodleian Library takes readers through the Library’s history, from its founding in 1602 by Sir Thomas Bodley to the present day. Along the way, the book traces the development of the Library’s incomparable collection, complete with details that reveal the eccentricities of those who have helped shape it, including Bodley himself, who conceived of the Library as a “republic of the learned,” and King George VI, who inadvertently delayed the opening of the New Bodleian in 1946 when he broke the key in the lock. Covering the major moments in the Library’s history and with a great many fun facts—How did the Library come to own not one of Shakespeare’s First Folios but two?—the book also apprises readers of its present concerns, including the building of individual subject libraries across Oxford, the use of underground passages, and the perennial search for more space.

How did a library founded over four hundred years ago grow to become the world-renowned institution it is today, home to over thirteen million items? From its foundation by Sir Thomas Bodley in 1598 to the opening of the Weston Library in 2015, this illustrated account shows how the Library’s history has been involved with the British monarchy and political events throughout the centuries. The history of the Library is also a history of collectors and collections, and this book traces the story of major donations and purchases, making use of the Library’s own substantial archives to show how it came to house key items such as early confirmations of the Magna Carta, Shakespeare’s First Folio, and the manuscript of Jane Austen’s earliest writings, among many others.  

This revised edition brings the history of the Bodleian Library up to the present moment. Beautifully illustrated with prints, portraits, manuscripts, and archival material, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of libraries and collections.

This remarkable book, written by former slave David F. Dorr, published in the mid-nineteenth century and only recently rediscovered, is an uncommon travel narrative. In the 1850s Dorr accompanied Louisiana plantation owner Cornelius Fellowes on a tour of the world's major cities, with the promise that when they returned to the United States, Dorr would be given his freedom. When that promise was broken, Dorr escaped to Ohio and wrote of his experiences in A Colored Man Round the World.
Malini Johar Schueller has edited and annotated the 1858 text and added a critical introduction that provides a useful context for understanding and appreciating this important but heretofore neglected document. Her edition of A Colored Man Round the World provides a fascinating account of Dorr's negotiation of the conflicting roles of slave versus man, taking into account all of the racial complexities that existed at the time. As a traveler abroad, Dorr claimed an American selfhood that allowed him mobility in Europe, and he benefited from the privileges accorded American "Orientalists" venturing in the near East. However, any empowerment that Dorr experienced while a tourist vanished upon his return to America.
The book will be welcomed for the rare perspective it provides of the mid-nineteenth century, through the eyes of an African-American slave and for the light it casts on world and U.S. history as well as on questions of racial and national identity.
Malini Johar Schueller is Professor of English, University of Florida.

The comedy Susenbrotus is a neo-Latin play, written by the students of Trinity College Cambridge and performed before King James I at Royston in March 1615/16. It has never before been edited or translated. This edition contains the Latin text (prepared from a collation of the two extant manuscript copies), an English translation with annotations to classical and contemporary allusions, and an introduction tracing the development of humanist Latin drama in the universities during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.
Susenbrotus is in many ways representative of later university comedy. It is a rowdy, bawdy farce with roots in the Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence. The wit and much of the humor in these plays is in the reworking of traditional themes with characters and situations adapted to contemporary types and topical satire. Almost every playwright for the professional stage (with the notable exception of Shakespeare) either wrote or acted in university plays. Moreover, they were popular forms of entertainment and were attended not only by members of the academic community but also by visiting dignitaries, courtiers, foreign ambassadors, and on occasion, the English monarchs.
Susenbrotus is special among later university plays because it was specifically written for King James I. It was meant to flatter the king, who prided himself on his humanist education, with a display of wit and erudition. It was also meant to entertain: the play itself is quite funny. It involves the antics of several contemporary types (the pedant, a poet, a Spanish dandy, and a braggart soldier) vying for the affection of a cross-dressed boy. Much of the wit in Susenbrotus is verbal: scholarly puns, sexual metaphors, classical allusions, and quotations that are explained in annotations. The sustained transvestitism of the character Fortunia distinguishes it from its classical sources as well as from other plays of its type. Unlike Latin texts that were submitted to publishing houses and therefore corrected or stylized by printers, Susenbrotus is an example of Latin as it was written in the seventeenth century.
Connie McQuillen is Associate Professor of Humanities, Southwest State University, Minnesota.

Toward the end of the last century Cicero's work came under attack from several angles. His political stance was sharply criticized for inconsistency by Theodor Mommsen and others, his philosophical works for lack of originality. Since then scholars have come to a better understanding of the political conditions that informed the views of Mommsen and his contemporaries about Caesar and Cicero, and as a result Cicero's writings have been restored to a more appropriate position in the literature and history of the Roman Republic. At the same time recent years have seen an intensive study of Hellenistic philosophy, and this has shown more clearly than before that, even while following Greek models, Cicero nonetheless pursued his own political and, in the ethical works, moralistic agenda.
Composed in haste shortly before Cicero's death, de Officiis has exercised enormous influence over the centuries. It is all the more surprising that Andrew R. Dyck's volume is the first detailed English commentary on the work written in this century. It deals with the problems of the Latin text (taking account of Michael Winterbottom's new edition), it delineates the work's structure and sometimes elusive train of thought, clarifies the underlying Greek and Latin concepts, and provides starting points for approaching the philosophical and historical problems that de Officiis raises.
A work of major importance for classicists, philosophers, and ancient historians, this Commentary will be an invaluable companion to all readers of Cicero's last philosophical work.
Andrew R. Dyck is Professor of Classics, University of California, Los Angeles.
Publication of this volume is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Thomas C. Moser, Jr. explores the fascinating body of medieval Latin erotic poetry found in English manuscripts. His study describes the intellectual and social context from which the great erotic songs of the twelfth century emerged, and examines a variety of erotic poems, from school exercises to the magnificent lyrics found in Arundel 384. He also illuminates the influence of neoplatonic philosophy on this poetry, explicating key neoplatonic texts and applying that analysis in close readings of erotic lyrics from the same period and milieu.
A Cosmos of Desire will interest scholars of medieval literature as well as specialists in Latin poetry and philosophy. Students of Middle English literature will find that it fills an important gap in our understanding of English intellectual life between the twelfth and the fourteenth century. All Latin prose and poetry is translated, some works for the first time, and the book is generously illustrated with photographs of the manuscripts discussed.
Thomas C. Moser, Jr. is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Cinema is a medium of light. And during Weimar Germany's advance to technological modernity, light - particularly the representational possibilities of electrical light - became the link between the cinema screen and the rapid changes that were transforming German life.In Frances Guerin's compelling history of German silent cinema of the 1920s, the innovative use of light is the pivot around which a new conception of a national cinema, and a national culture emerges. Guerin depicts a nocturnal Germany suffused with light - electric billboards, storefronts, police searchlights - and shows how this element of the mise-en-scene came to reflect both the opportunities and the anxieties surrounding modernity and democracy. Guerin's interpretations center on use of light in films such as Schatten (1923), Variete (1925), Metropolis (1926), and Der Golem (1920). In these films we see how light is the substance of image composition, the structuring device of the narrative, and the central thematic concern. This history relieves German films of the responsibility to explain the political and ideological instability of the period, an instability said to be the uncertain foundation of Nazism. In unlocking this dubious link, A Culture of Light redefines the field of German film scholarship.

A knees-up at the county fair. A duo of dancing ogres. A celebratory circle dance at London’s Piccadilly Circus. All of these lively scenarios feature in this enchanting survey of dance illustration throughout the centuries. But what can these vibrant—and often irreverent—images reveal to us about the history of dance and our changing attitudes toward it over time?

 

Drawing on a range of materials from the Bodleian Library, including manuscripts, visual art, dance cards, and invitations to balls, A Dance Through Time explores the imaginative ways in which artists and illustrators have responded to the challenge of creating a sense of movement. Social dancing reveals a dynamic tension between decorum and disregard, and for centuries artists have conveyed this in a highly stylized manner that makes use of curved forms to mimic gracious gestures and angular lines to represent those deemed showy or uncouth. Here, each illustration is carefully analyzed for what it shows us about the behavioral expectations of the time.

Lavishly illustrated, this book takes readers on a captivating journey through the changing fashions in European dance—from the waltz to the cha cha to the unbridled energy of rock and roll—providing ample insight into its history and colorful imagery.

Read the novel that is #43 on the Modern Library's 100 Best of the 20th Century list and the Guardian called "a comic masterpiece" and the New York Times praised as "immensely entertaining."

A Dance to the Music of Time is a landmark work of fiction, praised by readers and critics and other novelists throughout the 75 years since the first volume was published. Equal parts funny and heartbreaking, clever and moving, Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London.

Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I and carries through the 1950s, with all the changes of society, characters, and relationships that those shifting eras bring.

Four very different young men on the threshold of manhood dominate this opening volume of A Dance to the Music of Time. The narrator, Jenkins—a budding writer—shares a room with Templer, already a passionate womanizer, and Stringham, aristocratic and reckless. Widmerpool, as hopelessly awkward as he is intensely ambitious, lurks on the periphery of their world. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, these four gain their initiations into sex, society, business, and art. A masterpiece of modern fiction, Powell's epic creates a rich portrait of life in England between the wars.

"Reading Powell," says the New York Times, "is like living someone else's life, inextricably entangled with your own." Give this first volume a try, and you'll find characters and scenes and insights that will stay with you for the rest of your life.

Includes these novels:
A Question of Upbringing
A Buyer's Market
The Acceptance World
 

Read the novel that is #43 on the Modern Library's 100 Best of the 20th Century list and the Guardian called "a comic masterpiece" and the New York Times praised as "immensely entertaining."

A Dance to the Music of Time is a landmark work of fiction, praised by readers and critics and other novelists throughout the 75 years since the first volume was published. Equal parts funny and heartbreaking, clever and moving, Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I and carries through the 1950s, with all the changes to society, character, and relationships those shifting eras bring.

In this final volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, Nick Jenkins describes a world of ambition, intrigue, and dissolution. England has won the war, but its costs, physical and moral, were vast. Widmerpool's wife sets a snare for the young writer X. Trapnel, while her husband suffers private agony and public humiliation. Set against a background of politics, business, high society, and the counterculture in England and Europe, this magnificent work of art sounds an unforgettable requiem for an age.

"Reading Powell," says the New York Times, "is like living someone else's life, inextricably entangled with your own." Give this first volume a try, and you'll find characters and scenes and insights that will stay with you for the rest of your life.

Includes these novels:
Books Do Furnish a Room
Temporary Kings
Hearing Secret Harmonies
 

Read the novel that is #43 on the Modern Library's 100 Best of the 20th Century list and the Guardian called "a comic masterpiece" and the New York Times praised as "immensely entertaining."

A Dance to the Music of Time is a landmark work of fiction, praised by readers and critics and other novelists throughout the 75 years since the first volume was published. Equal parts funny and heartbreaking, clever and moving, Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I and continues through the 1950s.

In the background of this second volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, the rumble of distant events in Germany and Spain presages the storm of World War II. In England, even as the whirl of marriages and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures gathers speed, men and women find themselves on the brink of fateful choices.

"Reading Powell," says the New York Times, "is like living someone else's life, inextricably entangled with your own." Give this first volume a try, and you'll find characters and scenes and insights that will stay with you for the rest of your life




Includes these novels:
At Lady Molly's
Casanova's Chinese Restaurant
The Kindly Ones

Read the novel that is #43 on the Modern Library's 100 Best of the 20th Century list and the Guardian called "a comic masterpiece" and the New York Times praised as "immensely entertaining."

A Dance to the Music of Time is a landmark work of fiction, praised by readers and critics and other novelists throughout the 75 years since the first volume was published. Equal parts funny and heartbreaking, clever and moving, Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I and continues through the 1950s and all the changes to life, society, and relationships those shifting eras bring. 

In this third volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, we again meet Widmerpool, doggedly rising in rank; Jenkins, shifted from one dismal army post to another; Stringham, heroically emerging from alcoholism; Templer, still on his eternal sexual quest. Here, too, we are introduced to Pamela Flitton, one of the most beautiful and dangerous women in modern fiction. Wickedly barbed in its wit, uncanny in its seismographic recording of human emotions and social currents, this saga stands as an unsurpassed rendering of England's finest yet most costly hour.

"Reading Powell," says the New York Times, "is like living someone else's life, inextricably entangled with your own." Give Dance a try, and you'll find characters and scenes and insights that will stay with you for the rest of your life.

Includes these novels:
The Valley of Bones
The Soldier's Art
The Military Philosophers

An opportunity to experience the daily hustle and bustle of life in the late Middle Ages, A Day in a Medieval City provides a captivating dawn-to-dark account of medieval life. A visual trek through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—with seasoned historian and expert on medieval iconography Chiara Frugoni as guide—this book offers a vast array of images and vignettes that depicts the everyday hardships and commonplace pleasures for people living in the Middle Ages.

A Day in a Medieval City breathes life into the activities of the city streets, homes, fields, schools, and places of worship. With entertaining anecdotes and gritty details, it engages the modern reader with its discoveries of the religious, economic, and institutional practices of the day. From urban planning and education to child care, hygiene, and the more leisurely pursuits of games, food, books, and superstitions, Frugoni unearths the daily routines of the private and public lives of citizens. A Day in a Medieval City is a charming portal to the Middle Ages that you'll surely want with you on your travels to Europe—or in your armchair.

An extensive revision of the valued but unobtainable 1960 edition. Nearly 300 key documents are now readily available in translation.

Combining impeccable scholarship and literary elegance, David Wetzel depicts the drama of machinations and passions that exploded in a war that forever changed the face of European history.

To read accounts of late medieval banquets is to enter a fantastical world where live lions guard nude statues, gilded stags burst into song, and musicians play from within pies. We can almost hear the clock sound from within a glass castle, taste the fire-breathing roast boar, and smell the rose water cascading in a miniature fountain. Such vivid works of art and performance required collaboration among artists in many fields, as well as the participation of the audience.

A Feast for the Eyes is the first book-length study of the court banquets of northwestern Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Christina Normore draws on an array of artworks, archival documents, chroniclers’ accounts, and cookbooks to re-create these events and reassess the late medieval visual culture in which banquets were staged. Feast participants, she shows, developed sophisticated ways of appreciating artistic skill and attending to their own processes of perception, thereby forging a court culture that delighted in the exercise of fine aesthetic judgment.

Challenging modern assumptions about the nature of artistic production and reception, A Feast for the Eyes yields fresh insight into the long history of multimedia work and the complex relationships between spectacle and spectators.

The banquet gives rise to a special moment when thought and the senses—words and food—enhance each other. Throughout history, the ideal of the symposium has reconciled the angel and the beast in the human, renewing the interdependence between the mouth that speaks and the mouth that eats. Michel Jeanneret's lively book explores the paradigm of the banquet as a guide to significant tendencies in Renaissance Humanist culture and shows how this culture in turn illuminates the tensions between physical and mental pleasures. Ranging widely over French, Italian, German, and Latin texts, Jeanneret not only investigates the meal as a narrative artefact but enquires as well into aspects of sixteenth-century anthropology and aesthetics. 

By the time the “Scramble for Africa” among European colonial powers began in the late nineteenth century, Africa had already been globally connected for centuries. Its gold had fueled the economies of Europe and the Islamic world for nearly a millennium, and the sophisticated kingdoms spanning its west coast had traded with Europeans since the fifteenth century. Until at least 1650, this was a trade of equals, using a variety of currencies—most importantly, cowrie shells imported from the Maldives and nzimbu shells imported from Brazil. But, as the slave trade grew, African kingdoms began to lose prominence in the growing global economy. We have been living with the effects of this shift ever since. 

With A Fistful of Shells, Toby Green transforms our view of West and West-Central Africa by reconstructing the world of these kingdoms, which revolved around trade, diplomacy, complex religious beliefs, and the production of art. Green shows how the slave trade led to economic disparities that caused African kingdoms to lose relative political and economic power. The concentration of money in the hands of Atlantic elites in and outside these kingdoms brought about a revolutionary nineteenth century in Africa, parallel to the upheavals then taking place in Europe and America. Yet political fragmentation following the fall of African aristocracies produced radically different results as European colonization took hold.

Drawing not just on written histories, but on archival research in nine countries, art, oral history, archaeology, and letters, Green lays bare the transformations that have shaped world politics and the global economy since the fifteenth century and paints a new and masterful portrait of West Africa, past and present.

"Demonstrates the clarity of [Brown's] editorial technique, his thoroughly impressive control of the sources, his exhaustive knowledge of the repertory, and his penetrating stylistic insight. It is a summation of his quarter century of scholarship."—Journal of the American Musicological Society

Remarkable for its scope and erudition, Jorge Arditi's new study offers a fascinating history of mores from the High Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. Drawing on the pioneering ideas of Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu, Arditi examines the relationship between power and social practices and traces how power changes over time.

Analyzing courtesy manuals and etiquette books from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, Arditi shows how the dominant classes of a society were able to create a system of social relations and put it into operation. The result was an infrastructure in which these classes could successfully exert power. He explores how the ecclesiastical authorities of the Middle Ages, the monarchies from the fifteenth through the seventeenth century, and the aristocracies during the early stages of modernity all forged their own codes of manners within the confines of another, dominant order. Arditi goes on to describe how each of these different groups, through the sustained deployment of their own forms of relating with one another, gradually moved into a position of dominance.

In contemporary political discourse, it is common to denounce violent acts as “terroristic.” But this reflexive denunciation is a surprisingly recent development. In A Genealogy of Terror in Eighteenth-Century France, Ronald Schechter tells the story of the term’s evolution in Western thought, examining a neglected yet crucial chapter of our complicated romance with terror.
 
For centuries prior to the French Revolution, the word “terror” had largely positive connotations. Subjects flattered monarchs with the label “terror of his enemies.” Lawyers invoked the “terror of the laws.” Theater critics praised tragedies that imparted terror and pity. By August 1794, however, terror had lost its positive valence. As revolutionaries sought to rid France of its enemies, terror became associated with surveillance committees, tribunals, and the guillotine. By unearthing the tradition that associated terror with justice, magnificence, and health, Schechter helps us understand how the revolutionary call to make terror the order of the day could inspire such fervent loyalty in the first place—even as the gratuitous violence of the revolution eventually transformed it into the dreadful term we would recognize today. Most important, perhaps, Schechter proposes that terror is not an import to Western civilization—as contemporary discourse often suggests—but rather a domestic product with a long and consequential tradition. 

An inquiry into the lives of children of similar, if not identical, historical an cultural heritage who today find themselves in radically opposed ideological worlds, regarding one another across the concrete manifestation of their considerable differences, the Berlin Wall. Under these circumstances, what are the significant factors that contribute to the development in children of feelings of loyalty to or alienation from their nation? How do they view not only themselves, but the "other" Germans as well? How do they come to terms, emotionally and cognitively, with a unique, frequently painful, and frustrating reality? What are the lessons intended for them by their societies, and what lessons do they in fact learn? How do these children persist as Germans while at the same time becoming something else -- "communists? or "capitalists"?

Thomas Davey conducted interviews with children both sides of the Wall, participated in their daily lives, collected their drawings, talked with their teachers and families and grew aware of just how attentive children can be to moral and political subtleties of national life. The result is a revealing and dramatic portrait of a young generation coming to terms with complex national and historical circumstances of the two cites of East and West Berlin.

Gem of the Adriatic, Trieste sparkled and beckoned through the pages of poets and novelists. Drawn there in search of literary ghosts, of the poet Umberto Saba and the novelists Italo Svevo and James Joyce, Joseph Cary found instead a city with an imaginative life of its own, the one that rises, tantalizing from the pages of this book. The story of Cary's travels, A Ghost in Trieste, is also a tale of discovery and transformation, as the bustling world of port and airplane, baggage and trams and trains becomes the landscape of history and literature, language and art, psychoanalysis and the self.

Here is the crossroads of East and West. A port held in turn by the Romans, the Venetians, the Austrians, the Germans, the Slavs, and finally the Italians, Trieste is the capital of nowhere, fertile source of a unique literary florescence before the First World War. At times an exile home and an exiled city. "I cannot claim to have walked across it all,:" wrote Saba, the poet of Trieste in 1910 of the city Cary crosses and recrosses, seeking the poetry of the place that inspired its literary giants. Trieste's cultural and historical riches, its geographical splendor of hills and sea and mysterious presence unfold in a series of stories, monologues and literary juxtapositions that reveal the city's charms as well as its seductive hold on the writer's imagination. Throughout, literary and immediate impressions alike are elaborated in paintings and maps, and in handsome line drawings by Nicholas Read.

This "clownish and adolescent Parsifal," this Trieste of the "prickly grace," this place "impaled in my heart like a permanent point," this symbol of the Adriatic, this "city made of books" — here the book remakes the city. The Trieste of allusions magically becomes a city of palpable allure, of warmth and trying contradictions and gritty beauty. Part travel diary, part guide book, part literary history, A Ghost in Trieste is a brilliant introduction to an extraordinary time and place. In Joseph Cary, Trieste has found a new poet, and readers, a remarkably captivating companion and guide.

During the early 1880s a continual interaction of events, ideas, and people in Ireland and the United States created a "Greater Ireland" spanning the Atlantic that profoundly impacted both Irish and American society. In A Greater Ireland: The Land League and Transatlantic Nationalism in Gilded Age America, Ely M. Janis closely examines the Irish National Land League, a transatlantic organization with strong support in Ireland and the United States. Founded in Ireland in 1879 against the backdrop of crop failure and agrarian unrest, the Land League pressured the British government to reform the Irish landholding system and allow Irish political self-rule. The League quickly spread to the United States, with hundreds of thousands of Irish Americans participating in branches in their local communities.
            As this "Greater Ireland" flourished, new opportunities arose for women and working-class men to contribute within Irish-American society. Exploring the complex interplay of ethnicity, class, and gender, Janis demonstrates the broad range of ideological, social, and political opinion held by Irish Americans in the 1880s. Participation in the Land League deeply influenced a generation that replaced their old county and class allegiances with a common cause, shaping the future of Irish-American nationalism.

Those who undertake a scholarly edition of a Middle English text have until now had no general guide for their work. All who study English literary works must rely on editions at some stage, and this volume will provide them with many perspectives on the formation of these necessary scholarly tools. Editors of texts in other medieval languages and indeed all those engaged with questions of scholarly editing--whether practical, historical, or theoretical--will also find important contributions in this volume.
A Guide to Editing Middle English collects nineteen essays and three appendices written by leading text editors in Middle English. A number of essays deal primarily with theoretical questions, while others offer assessments of historical developments in editing, especially in regard to the most well-known Middle English works. Most of the essays deal with practical matters: how to use a computer in preparing and presenting an edition; how to form and arrange the standard parts of an edition; and how to handle problems presented by texts in areas such as science, astrology, and cooking. The three appendices provide bibliographical references to dictionaries, facsimiles, and manuscript description.
Contributors, in addition to the editors, are Peter Baker, Richard Beadle, Norman Blake, Helen Cooper, A. S. G. Edwards, Jennifer Fellows, David C. Greetham, Mary Hamel, Constance Heiatt, Nicholas Jacobs, Geroge Keiser, Peter J. Lucas, Maldwyn Mills, Linne Mooney, and Peter Robinson.
The many and varied perspectives of this volume will make it of interest to readers of Middle English texts, those involved in textual scholarship, and those interested in editing in general. It occupies a unique place in the field of Middle English studies and will likely remain a standard reference tool for a long time.
Vincent McCarren is a Research Associate with the Middle English Dictionary at the University of Michigan. Douglas Moffat, formerly with the Middle English Dictionary, is a Development Officer with the University of Michigan.

Are you looking for
•    A Scandinavian name for your baby?
•    The names of Norse gods and heroes?
•    The history and meaning of Scandinavian first names?
•    Variations and alternate spellings for common Scandinavian names?
•    Naming traditions and customs in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark?

A Handbook of Scandinavian Names includes a dictionary of more than fifteen hundred given names from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, plus some from Iceland and Finland. Each entry provides a guide to pronunciation and the origin and meaning of the name. Many entries also include variations and usage in the Scandinavian countries and famous bearers of the name.
    Adding engaging context to the dictionary section is an extensive comparative guide to naming practices. The authors discuss immigration to North America from Scandinavia and the ways given names and surnames were adapted in the New World. Also included in the book is a history of Scandinavian names, information on “Name Days,” and discussion of significant names from mythology and history, including naming traditions in royal families.

 

Translated by Leon J. Weinberger with Dena Ordan

"This slender anonymous work, spanning 1389 to 1611, presents the priorities and concerns of a Jewish community straddling the late medieval and early modern periods. Ample footnotes and explanations provide the lay reader with sufficient background to understand the references to historical events and figures, to ideologies and to institutions. A comprehensive introduction presents the realities of Prague and Bohemia, as well as offering a helpful discussion of the chronicle and other contemporary Jewish accounts."
—Conservative Jewish Quarterly

"In about 1615 an anonymous Jew from Prague composed a short Hebrew chronicle to recount 'the expulsions, miracles, and other occurrences befalling [the Jews] in Prague and the other lands of our long exile.' Abraham David discovered the manuscript [and] added glosses, historical notes, and an introduction. . . . The chronicle, with its brief annual entries, is not a continuous narrative, but does give a feeling of immediacy, like a newspaper."
—Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry

Known by the Greeks as ‘Megalónisos,’ or the ‘Great Island,’ the island of Crete has a long and varied history. Steeped in historical and cultural heritage, Crete is the most visited of the Greek islands. It has also been of paramount strategic importance for thousands of years, thanks to its location close to the junction of three continents and at the heart of the eastern Mediterranean Sea. For much of its long history, the island has been ruled by foreign invaders. Under the rule of the Mycenaeans, Dorians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Venetians, Ottoman Turks and, briefly, the Third Reich, Cretans, who are fierce lovers of freedom, have adapted to living with their conquerors and to the influence of foreign rule on their culture. In a dazzling contrast to these three thousand years of domination, we see two periods of the island’s independence: the vibrant apogee of the Minoan civilization and the brief period of autonomy before union with Greece at the beginning of the twentieth century.

To guide us through this spectacular history, Chris Moorey, who has lived in Crete for over twenty years, provides an engaging and lively account of the island spanning from the Stone Age to the present day. A History of Crete steps in to fill a gap in scholarship on this fascinating island, providing the first complete history of Crete to be published for over twenty years, and the first ever that is written with a wide readership in mind.
 

“A History of Fascism is an invaluable sourcebook, offering a rare combination of detailed information and thoughtful analysis. It is a masterpiece of comparative history, for the comparisons enhance our understanding of each part of the whole. The term ‘fascist,’ used so freely these days as a pejorative epithet that has nearly lost its meaning, is precisely defined, carefully applied and skillfully explained. The analysis effectively restores the dimension of evil.”—Susan Zuccotti, The Nation

“A magisterial, wholly accessible, engaging study. . . . Payne defines fascism as a form of ultranationalism espousing a myth of national rebirth and marked by extreme elitism, mobilization of the masses, exaltation of hierarchy and subordination, oppression of women and an embrace of violence and war as virtues.”—Publishers Weekly

Between 1780 and 1937, Jews in Germany produced numerous new translations of the Hebrew Bible into German. Intended for Jews who were trilingual, reading Yiddish, Hebrew, and German, they were meant less for religious use than to promote educational and cultural goals. Not only did translations give Jews vernacular access to their scripture without Christian intervention, but they also helped showcase the Hebrew Bible as a work of literature and the foundational text of modern Jewish identity.

This book is the first in English to offer a close analysis of German Jewish translations as part of a larger cultural project. Looking at four distinct waves of translations, Abigail Gillman juxtaposes translations within each that sought to achieve similar goals through differing means. As she details the history of successive translations, we gain new insight into the opportunities and problems the Bible posed for different generations and gain a new perspective on modern German Jewish history.