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Looks at early religious texts and their influence on medieval literature and culture.

Looks at early religious texts and their influence on medieval literature and culture.

Explore the opportunities and challenges of Septuagint studies

Recent research into the Septuagint has revealed numerous examples of modifications of the meaning of the Hebrew text in the course of its translation into Greek. This collection of essays by one of the leading scholars on the Septuagint shows how complex the translation of individual books was, provides reasons for differences between the Hebrew and Greek Bibles, and paves the way for a theology of the Septuagint. Articles introduce the field of Septuagint studies, the problem of the Letter of Aristeas, and the Hellenistic environment and the hermeneutics of Hellenistic Judaism.

Features:

• A methodological discussion of whether and how a theology of the Septuagint can be written
• Essays introducing the field of Septuagint studies and its Hellenistic environment and the hermeneutics of Hellenistic Judaism
• Fifteen English and German essays covering twenty-five years of Septuagint research

Traditional Chinese Children’s Primers: A Sourcebook is the first anthology of traditional Chinese children’s textbooks in a European language. This selection of eleven primers, spanning over two thousand years of Chinese education history, remains well-known in East Asia and the global diaspora of Confucian-heritage cultures. These texts represent an important genre of children’s literature and education materials that were employed to teach basic vocabulary, develop cultural literacy, and start students on their journey toward greater fortunes in the imperial examinations.

The sourcebook covers texts from the second-century BCE to the late twentieth-century,  and a range of subject areas, including etiquette instruction, literacy training, character education, and Confucian and Daoist thought. The Classic of Family Reverence (Xiaojing), for example, opens a window onto early Confucian thought in ancient China, while the Extended Wise Sayings (Zengguang xian wen) represents the eclectic worldviews and beliefs of the seventeenth century, and Lord Wenchang’s Essay on Quiet Merits (Wenchang dijun yinzhi wen) introduces readers to the tradition of popular morality books.

This first-of-a-kind sourcebook in English addresses a long-standing gap in the translation of primers and provides impetus for research in the development of character and virtues, comparative literature, and cross-cultural education studies.

"Navajo teachings provide a classic study of a land-based religion that involves every aspect of the physical world in a spiritual universe. Nothing is too big or small—everything holds a power, provides a teaching, and responds through an inner form. Beyond the material life of daily existence, there lies a world of interconnected relations made apparent in Volume II, The Natural World. This book graphically describes elements of life rooted in the Navajo philosophy of hózhǫ́. A unified harmony results. I highly recommend this book as a study in understanding the power of relationships that populate the Diné worldview."
—Clayton Long, a participant/creator of the Navajo Rosetta Stone; Bilingual Education Director (retired), San Juan School District, Utah; and curriculum developer for the Navajo Nation.

"For days after reading The Natural World, I found myself looking at my surroundings in a different way. The vibrant spirit of the earth and every plant or animal I encountered seemed to glow through a translucent shell. I have always been a nature-lover and gotten a sense of peace from being outdoors, but since reading these beautiful Navajo teachings I am filled with a profound sense of joy and gratitude every time I walk outside."
—Cindy Yurth, The Navajo Times

A statistician and pioneer in the treatment of the mentally ill, Edward Jarvis (1803–1884) decided late in life to record his recollections of Concord, Massachusetts, the town in which he was raised. Using Lemuel Shattuck's History of Concord as the springboard for his thoughts, Jarvis produced a remarkable document. Traditions and Reminiscences is encyclopedic in scope but intimate in style; it provides an astonishingly detailed account of life in early nineteenth-century Concord. Jarvis escorts us through the family home, making certain we understand the function and value of each item in the domestic scene. Then he is off to the neighbors' houses, to the schoolhouse, the church, the social clubs, the library, the post office, the town hall, and even the tavern, where he unabashedly counts patrons' drinks. Along the way we learn about neighborly cooperation—quiltings, husking bees, and barn raisings—about social manners and respectability, and about local vices. The result is a vast storehouse of information and a vivid portrait of life in an early nineteenth-century preindustrial community. The memoir also provides a first-hand witness to the crusade for moral reform that transformed mid-nineteenth-century New England.

Humane ideals were central to the image Athenians had of themselves and their city during the classical period. Tragic plays, which formed a part of civic education, often promoted pity and compassion. But it is less clear to what extent Athenians embraced such ideals in daily life. How were they expected to respond, emotionally and pragmatically, to the suffering of other people? Under what circumstances? At what risk to themselves?

In this book, Rachel Hall Sternberg draws on evidence from Greek oratory and historiography of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE to study the moral universe of the ancient Athenians: how citizens may have treated one another in times of adversity, when and how they were expected to help. She develops case studies in five spheres of everyday life: home nursing, the ransom of captives, intervention in street crimes, the long-distance transport of sick and wounded soldiers, and slave torture. Her close reading of selected narratives suggests that Athenians embraced high standards for helping behavior—at least toward relatives, friends, and some fellow citizens. Meanwhile, a subtle discourse of moral obligation strengthened the bonds that held Athenian society together, encouraging individuals to bring their personal behavior into line with the ideals of the city-state.

Compelling stories of shipwreck, adventure, and death on the high seas, now back in print.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a time of great colonial expansion, marked by a mercantile frenzy of ships carrying merchants, aristocrats, missionaries, sailors, Inquisitors, botanists, and statesmen pursuing the spoils of empire. Among the narratives that chronicled these voyages, those of the Portuguese are unequaled. C. R. Boxer’s fascinating translations of famous Portuguese shipwreck stories detail the disasters and terrors plaguing the perilous sea trading route between Portugal and India.

Trail of Footprints offers an intimate glimpse into the commission, circulation, and use of indigenous maps from colonial Mexico. A collection of sixty largely unpublished maps from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and made in the southern region of Oaxaca anchors an analysis of the way ethnically diverse societies produced knowledge in colonial settings. Mapmaking, proposes Hidalgo, formed part of an epistemological shift tied to the negotiation of land and natural resources between the region’s Spanish, Indian, and mixed-race communities. The craft of making maps drew from social memory, indigenous and European conceptions of space and ritual, and Spanish legal practices designed to adjust spatial boundaries in the New World. Indigenous mapmaking brought together a distinct coalition of social actors—Indian leaders, native towns, notaries, surveyors, judges, artisans, merchants, muleteers, collectors, and painters—who participated in the critical observation of the region’s geographic features. Demand for maps reconfigured technologies associated with the making of colorants, adhesives, and paper that drew from Indian botany and experimentation, trans-Atlantic commerce, and Iberian notarial culture. The maps in this study reflect a regional perspective associated with Oaxaca’s decentralized organization, its strategic position amidst a network of important trade routes that linked central Mexico to Central America, and the ruggedness and diversity of its physical landscape.

Trailing Clouds of Glory is the first examination of the roles played in the Mexican War by the large number of men who served with Taylor and who would be prominent in the next war, both as volunteer and regular army officers, and it provides fresh information, even on such subjects as Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant. Particularly interesting for the student of the Civil War are largely unknown aspects of the Mexican War service of Daniel Harvey Hill, Braxton Bragg, and Thomas W. Sherman.

A timely, politically savvy examination of how impossible disasters shape the very real possibilities of our world

Why would the normally buttoned-down national security state imagine lurid future scenarios like a zombie apocalypse? In Training for Catastrophe, author Lindsay Thomas shows how our security regime reimagines plausibility to focus on unlikely and even unreal events rather than probable ones. With an in-depth focus on preparedness (a pivotal, emergent national security paradigm since 9/11) she explores how fiction shapes national security.

Thomas finds fiction at work in unexpected settings, from policy documents and workplace training manuals to comics and video games. Through these texts—as well as plenty of science fiction—she examines the philosophy of preparedness, interrogating the roots of why it asks us to treat explicitly fictional events as real. Thomas connects this philosophical underpinning to how preparedness plays out in contemporary politics, emphasizing how it uses aesthetic elements like realism, genre, character, and plot to train people both to regard some disasters as normal and to ignore others.

Training for Catastrophe makes an important case for how these documents elicit consent and compliance. Thomas draws from a huge archive of texts—including a Centers for Disease Control comic about a zombie apocalypse, the work of Audre Lorde, and the political thrillers of former national security advisor Richard Clarke—to ask difficult questions about the uses and values of fiction. A major statement on how national security intrudes into questions of art and life, Training for Catastrophe is a timely intervention into how we confront disasters.

Journalist, editor, critic, translator, and women’s rights advocate, Margaret Fuller was America’s first major female intellectual. Throughout much of the late-19th and 20th centuries, however, critics and scholars largely saw her as a minor figure in the transcendentalist movement with which she is associated, and her work was considered secondary to that of male figures like Emerson and Hawthorne. While her biography—including her marriage to an Italian noble and her dramatic death in a shipwreck—was often the focus, her skill as a writer was generally overlooked, and her intellectual development largely ignored. 

In the early 1980s, David M. Robinson was one of the first scholars to publish an article that focused on Fuller’s mind and art. Now Transcendent Woman completes and extends this early work. Outlining the development of her philosophy, which Robinson defines as a “purpose-oriented form of thinking, tailored to the commitment and assets of each individual,” he traces Fuller’s intellectual journey, first in relation to her family and the people around her in New England and later in her travels in the midwestern United States and, more importantly, through Europe and her residency in Italy. He focuses first and foremost on what Fuller was reading (Goethe was key), what she was thinking as revealed in her letters and journals, and what she was writing, including seminal works such as Summer on the Lakes and Woman in the Nineteenth Century as well as lesser-known essays, translations, and short stories. Drawing extensively on primary sources, Robinson charts Fuller’s development and achievement as an original thinker and fearless advocate of democracy. 

At a moment when the requirements of belief and unbelief were being negotiated in unexpected ways, transcendentalism allowed for a more creative approach to spiritual questions. Interrogating the movement's alleged atheistic underpinnings, David Faflik contends that transcendentalism reconstituted the religious sensibilities of 1830s and 1840s New England, producing a dynamic and complex array of beliefs and behaviors that cannot be categorized as either religious or nonreligious. Rather than “the latest form of infidelity,” as one contemporary described it, adherents viewed their unconventional and distinct spiritual practices as a modern religion.

Transcendental Heresies draws on an expansive antebellum archive of period commentary and writings by transcendentalism's practitioners, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, and the women of transcendentalism's second and third waves. From Boston to Concord to the heady environs of Harvard, the species of unbelief they practiced multiplied the religious possibilities of the era, expressing misgivings about traditional notions of divinity, flouting religion's customary forms, and ultimately encouraging spiritual questioning.