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Now in paperback!

Former students, colleagues and friends of the eminent classicist and historian Louis H. Feldman are pleased to honor him with a Jubilee volume. While Feldman has long been considered an outstanding scholar of Josephus, his scholarly interests and research interests pertain to almost all aspects of the ancient world and Jews.

Features:

• Paperback format of an essential Brill resource
• Articles cover topics such as biblical interpretation, Judaism and Hellenism, Jews and Gentiles, history of the Mishnah and Talmud periods, and Jerusalem
• Contributors include the most prominent international scholars

Explore new theoretical tools and lines of analysis of rabbinic stories

Rabbinic literature includes hundreds of stories and brief narrative traditions. These narrative traditions often take the form of biographical anecdotes that recount a deed or event in the life of a rabbi. Modern scholars consider these narratives as didactic fictions—stories used to teach lessons, promote rabbinic values, and grapple with the tensions and conflicts of rabbinic life. Using methods drawn from literary and cultural theory, including feminist, structuralist, Marxist, and psychoanalytic methods, contributors analyze narratives from the Babylonian Talmud, midrash, Mishnah, and other rabbinic compilations to shed light on their meanings, functions, and narrative art. Contributors include Julia Watts Belser, Beth Berkowitz, Dov Kahane, Jane L. Kanarek, Tzvi Novick, James Adam Redfield, Jay Rovner, Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, Zvi Septimus, Dov Weiss, and Barry Scott Wimpfheimer.

Studies in Upplandic Runography is a detailed treatment of the runic inscriptions from the province of Uppland, Sweden, where runic art reached a high point in A.D. 1200 and where runic inscriptions are most numerous. Most of the runic monuments discussed are from the eleventh century, an important period when Sweden was making the transition from paganism to Christianity.

The names of nearly fifty rune-carvers (runographers), professional and amateur, are known. However, many of the inscriptions were left unsigned. Claiborne Thompson examines the major problem of how an unsigned inscription is attributed to a known carver. Since each carver had a distinctive style which must be delineated, the book contains an exhaustive survey of the norms of Upplandic runography. In order to match the inscriptions with their carvers, Thompson analyzes the entire corpus of inscriptions from Uppland, their formation, the artistic designs they bear, the shapes of the runes on them, the orthography and language on them, and the manner in which they were carved.

Thompson then establishes a set of criteria for determining the authorship of a runic monument, stressing rune forms. All of the criteria are used in an extensive discussion of the carvings of Asmund Karasun, an interesting and influential carver from the first half of the eleventh century.

In addition, Thompson’s review of research describes scholarly interest in the problems of runography beginning in the early seventeenth century. The book includes an introductory sketch of the cultural background of Uppland and relates the runic tradition to historical and cultural traditions in eleventh-century Sweden.

Now available in English

Josef Schmid's landmark publication, Studien zur Geschichte des Griechischen Apokalypse-Textes, has been the standard work for understanding Revelation's Greek manuscript tradition and textual history for more than sixty years. Despite the fact that most major studies on the book are based on Schmid's work, the work itself has long been out of print, making it difficult for the broader scholarly community to reassess Schmid's conclusions in light of recent manuscript discoveries and technological advances. This new translation of the work makes Schmid's detailed review of the history of textual scholarship; his comprehensive examination of the origin, history, and development of the Greek manuscripts of the book of Revelation; and his assessment of John's peculiar linguistic writing style accessible to a new generation of scholars.

Features

• A critical introduction that places Schmid's work in its historical and theoretical context
• Definitions and explanations of Schmid's text-critical terms and categories used in his construction of Revelation's Greek manuscript tradition
• The latest available information used to correct, update, and supplement Schmid's Greek manuscript data and historical and text-critical conclusions

The present volume of studies—a joint publication with the National Széchényi Library, Budapest—is the first Subsidium of the Central European Medieval Text series, accompanying CEMT vol. IX on the Illuminated Chronicle, composed in the fourteenth century at the royal court of Louis I of Hungary. The large size of the volume, with the text and its annotations, did not permit the inclusion of a detailed scholarly introduction, unlike other CEMT items, so it is here printed separately.

The first essays analyze the text and the illuminations of the Illuminated Chronicle (formerly called the Vienna Chronicle) from literary-historical, art historical and heraldic perspectives. They also summarize the literature on the chronicle for the past two hundred years. Additional studies address the narrative. Since the chronicle starts with the history of the Huns, the imaginary ancestors of the Hungarians, one essay addresses the Attila tradition in Hungarian historiography. Others devote attention to the dynastic struggles of the eleventh century, placing them in the context of amicitia and deditio, and to the image of St. Ladislas I as the “ideal king”. The final essays examine the fate of the fourteenth-century chronicle texts over the subsequent centuries, their appearance in legal texts, and their reception abroad.

Calls for aesthetic education to unite cultural practices of radical imagination with everyday practices of care

While Latin America was neoliberalism’s laboratory, Argentina and Chile have been crucibles for its cultural logics. In this book, D. Bret Leraul examines the rise of neoliberal culture in the Southern Cone through the educational infrastructures that disseminate and reproduce it. Leraul draws on literature and criticism, the history of higher education, and examples of recent social movements to propose a theory of cultural production for social transformation.

Study Without Ends charts the cultural consequences of introducing a neoliberal rationality into the region’s higher education landscape. The university’s increasing centrality within the literary institution and the rise of theoretical prose fiction suggest that poetics today is less about crafting literary works than instructing readers. At the same time, despite efforts to reduce education to human capital investment, it remains a process of personal and social transformation, as recent activism by Chilean students and Argentinean unemployed workers shows. In response to the compounding crises of social reproduction represented by the informal work and precarious livelihoods of people rendered surplus populations, and inspired by the decommodified labor of students, artists, women, and the unemployed, Leraul calls for a materialist aesthetic education that unites artistic culture’s practices of radical imagination and everyday culture’s practices of care.

This volume provides a generic description, based on a formal analysis of narrative structures, of the Middle English noncyclic verse romances. As a group, these poems have long resisted generic definition and are traditionally considered to be a conglomerate of unrelated tales held together in a historical matrix of similar themes and characters. As single narratives, they are thought of as random collections of events loosely structured in chronological succession. Susan Wittig, however, offers evidence that the romances are carefully ordered (although not always consciously so) according to a series of formulaic patterns and that their structures serve as vehicles for certain essential cultural patterns and are important to the preservation of some community-held beliefs.

The analysis begins on a stylistic level, and the same theoretical principles applied to the linguistic formulas of the poems also serve as a model for the study of narrative structures. The author finds that there are laws that govern the creation, selection, and arrangement of narrative materials in the romance genre and that act to restrict innovation and control the narrative form.

The reasons for this strict control are to be found in the functional relationship of the genre to the culture that produced it. The deep structure of the romance is viewed as a problem-solving pattern that enables the community to mediate important contradictions within its social, economic, and mythic structures. Wittig speculates that these contradictions may lie in the social structures of kinship and marriage and that they have been restructured in the narratives in a “practical” myth: the concept of power gained through the marriage alliance, and the reconciliation of the contradictory notions of marriage for power’s sake and marriage for love’s sake.

This advanced, thorough, and completely original study will be valuable to medieval specialists, classicists, linguists, folklorists, and Biblical scholars working in oral-formulaic narrative structure.

In this bold and innovative book, Massimo Modonesi weaves together theory and political practice by relating the concepts of subalternity, antagonism and autonomy to contemporary movements in Latin America and elsewhere.

In a sophisticated account, Modonesi reconstructs the debates between Marxist authors and schools of thought in order to sketch out informed strategies of resistance. He reviews the works of Gramsci, Negri, Castoriadis and Lefort, and engages with the arguments made by E. P. Thompson, Spivak, Laclau and Mouffe.

Subalternity, Antagonism, Autonomy firmly roots key theoretical arguments from a range of critical thinkers within specific political movements in order to recover these concepts as analytical instruments which can help to guide contemporary struggles.

Shilyh Warren reopens this understudied period and links it to a neglected era of women's filmmaking that took place from 1920 to 1940, another key period of thinking around documentary, race, and gender. Drawing women’s cultural expression during these two explosive times into conversation, Warren reconsiders key debates about subjectivity, feminism, realism, and documentary and their lasting epistemological and material consequences for film and feminist studies. She also excavates the lost ethnographic history of women's documentary filmmaking in the earlier era and explores the political and aesthetic legacy of these films in more explicitly feminist periods like the Seventies.

Filled with challenging insights and new close readings, Subject to Reality sheds light on a profound and unexamined history of feminist documentaries while revealing their influence on the filmmakers of today.

Chocolate and sugar, alcohol and tobacco, peyote and hallucinogenic mushrooms—these seductive substances have been a nexus of desire for both pleasure and profit in Mesoamerica since colonial times. But how did these substances seduce? And when and how did they come to be desired and then demanded, even by those who had never encountered them before? The contributors to this volume explore these questions across a range of times, places, and peoples to discover how the individual pleasures of consumption were shaped by social, cultural, economic, and political forces.

Focusing on ingestible substances as a group, which has not been done before in the scholarly literature, the chapters in Substance and Seduction trace three key links between colonization and commodification. First, as substances that were taken into the bodies of both colonizers and colonized, these foods and drugs participated in unexpected connections among sites of production and consumption; racial and ethnic categories; and free, forced, and enslaved labor regimes. Second, as commodities developed in the long transition from mercantile to modern capitalism, each substance in some way drew its enduring power from its ability to seduce: to stimulate bodies; to alter minds; to mark class, social, and ethnic boundaries; and to generate wealth. Finally, as objects of scholarly inquiry, each substance rewards interdisciplinary approaches that balance the considerations of pleasure and profit, materiality and morality, and culture and political economy.

Subaltern studies, the study of non-elite or underrepresented people, have revolutionized the writing of Middle Eastern history. Subversives and Mavericks in the Muslim Mediterranean represents the next step in this transformation. The book explores the lives of eleven nonconformists who became agents of political and social change, actively organizing new forms of resistance—against either colonial European regimes or the traditional societies in which they lived—that disrupted the status quo, in some cases, with dramatic results. These case studies highlight cross-border connections in the Mediterranean world, exploring how these channels were navigated.

Chapters in the book examine the lives of subversives and mavericks, such as Tawhida ben Shaykh, the first Arab woman to receive a medical degree; Mokhtar al-Ayari, a radical Tunisian labor leader; Nazli Hanem, Kmar Bayya, and Khiriya bin Ayyad, three aristocractic women who resisted the patriarchal structures of their societies by organizing and participating in intellectual salons for men and women and advocating social reform; Qaid Najim al-Akhsassi, an ex-slave and military officer, who fought against French and Spanish colonial expansion; and Boubeker al-Ghandjawi, a nearly illiterate trader who succeeded, though his diverse connections, in establishing important relations between the Moroccan sultan and the representative of the British government. Although based on individual and local perspectives, Subversives and Mavericks in the Muslim Mediterranean reveals new and unrecognized trans-local connections across the Muslim world, illuminating our understanding of these societies beyond narrow elite circles.