Results by title

A Catalogue of Greek Manuscripts at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor is a comprehensive, fully illustrated catalogue of the largest collection of Greek manuscripts in America, including 110 codices and fragments ranging from the fourth to the nineteenth century. The collection, held in the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Michigan Library, contains many manuscripts from Epirus and the Meteora monasteries built on high pinnacles of rocks in Thessaly. Nadezhda Kavrus-Hoffmann has based the manuscript descriptions on the latest developments in the fields of paleography and codicology, including the newest recommendations of the Institute for Research and History of Texts in Paris. The catalogue includes high-resolution plates of all the manuscripts, allowing researchers to compare the entries with other Greek manuscripts around the world. This catalogue contains a trove of fascinating information related to Byzantine culture that will be available for the first time to scholars working on various disciplines of the humanities such as Classical and Byzantine Studies, Art History, Medieval Studies, Theology, and History.
    This is the first volume of a projected two-volume set. Volume 2, also by Nadezhda Kavrus-Hoffmann, will contain descriptions of remaining Greek manuscripts in the Library’s collection, starting with Mich. Ms. 59 and ending with Mich. Ms. 238, for a total of 53 manuscripts and 8 fragments. Both volumes will have the same format – catalogue entries for each manuscript together with extensive illustrations. The publication date for Volume 2 has not been established.

A Catalogue of Greek Manuscripts at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Volume II unveils the rich diversity and enduring legacy of the Greek manuscript tradition preserved in one of North America's largest collections. Building on the acclaimed first volume, this second and concluding volume offers comprehensive illustrated descriptions of eighty-four manuscripts and fragments housed in the University of Michigan Library's Special Collections Research Center. The discovery of twenty-three previously unknown manuscripts and fragments significantly expands our understanding of Byzantine and post-Byzantine book culture, illuminating the remarkable continuity of Greek scholarly, liturgical, and artistic traditions from the ninth through the nineteenth centuries.

Each entry integrates codicological features, handwriting analysis, textual content, decoration, binding, provenance, and references to earlier scholarship as well as high-quality color plates to illustrate representative pages, script types, and illuminations. Among the exceptional highlights are a fragment of The Great Calculation According to the Indians by Maximos Planoudes, preserving portions of this rare mathematical treatise otherwise lost; an illuminated 1371 copy of The Heavenly Ladder by John Klimax, created by the renowned scribe Joasaph II of the Hodegon Monastery in Constantinople; and a newly identified manuscript containing rare patristic homilies linked to the sixteenth-century Choniates scriptorium in Venice.

The culmination of three decades of work by Michigan Natural Features Inventory ecologists, this essential guidebook to the natural communities of Michigan introduces the diverse terrain of a unique state. Small enough to carry in a backpack, this field guide provides a system for dividing the complex natural landscape of Michigan into easily understood and describable components called natural communities. Providing a new way to explore Michigan’s many environments, this book details natural communities ranging from patterned fen to volcanic bedrock glade and beyond. The descriptions are supplemented with distribution maps, vibrant photographs, and comprehensive lists of characteristic plant species. The authors suggest places to visit to further study each type of natural community and provide a comprehensive glossary of ecological terms, as well as a dichotomous key for aiding field identification. An invaluable resource, this book is meant to serve as a tool for those seeking to understand, describe, document, conserve, and restore the diversity of natural communities native to Michigan.

Discover Michigan’s rich ecological diversity with this indispensable field guide. Updated to reflect a decade of additional ecological surveys, continued learning, and new scientific discoveries, the second edition of A Field Guide to the Natural Communitiesof Michigan incorporates the latest understanding of the state’s natural landscapes. This revised edition adds three newly recognized natural community types; updates scientific nomenclature, photographs, distribution maps, species lists, and community descriptions; and refines the dichotomous keys to make field identification more accessible than ever. Drawing on more than four decades of intensive research by ecologists at the Michigan Natural Features Inventory, this essential guidebook introduces readers to Michigan’s remarkable ecological biodiversity.  Compact enough to carry in a backpack, this field guide provides a practical framework for dividing Michigan’s complex natural landscape into easily understood and describable components called natural communities. Providing an enlightening way to explore Michigan’s many environments, this book details natural communities ranging from patterned fen to volcanic bedrock glade and beyond. The descriptions are supplemented with distribution maps, vibrant photographs, and comprehensive lists of characteristic plant species. The authors suggest places to visit to further study each natural community type and provide a comprehensive glossary of ecological terms, as well as dichotomous keys for aiding on-site classification. An invaluable resource, this book is meant to serve as a tool for those seeking to understand, describe, document, conserve, and restore the diversity of natural communities native to Michigan.

A Frieze of Girls speaks with a fresh voice from an American era long past. This is more than Allan Seager's story of what happened; it is also about how "the feel of truth is very like the feel of fiction, especially when either is at all strange."

Seager gives us his coming-of-age story, from a high-school summer as a sometime cowboy in the Big Horn mountains to a first job at seventeen managing an antiquated factory in Memphis to a hard-drinking scholarship year in Oxford, cut short by tuberculosis. At once funny with an undercurrent of pain, the stories in A Frieze of Girls remind us of the realities we create to face the world and the past, and in turn of the realities of the world we must inevitably also confront. "Time makes fiction out of our memories," writes Seager. "We all have to have a self we can live with and the operation of memory is artistic---selecting, suppressing, bending, touching up, turning our actions inside out so that we can have not necessarily a likable, merely a plausible identity." A Frieze of Girls is Allan Seager at the top of his form, and a reminder that great writing always transcends mere fashion.

Allan Seager was Professor of English at the University of Michigan and author of many highly praised short stories and novels, including Amos Berry. He died in Tecumseh, Michigan, in 1968. Novelist Charles Baxter is the author of Saul and Patsy.

Focusing on the intersection of African Americans' nineteenth-century cultural values and the changing social and political conditions in the first half of the twentieth century, Jelks pays particularly close attention to the religious community's influence during their struggle toward a respectable social identity and fair treatment under the law. He explores how these competing values defined the community's politics as it struggled to expand its freedoms and change its status as a subjugated racial minority.

In 1838, the Regents of the University of Michigan contracted with Alexander Jackson Davis, who provided landmark designs in the Gothic Revival style. Although they approved Davis' designs, the financial situation forced the Regents to ultimately abandon them, and instead build in the classical style. The architect of these structures has been unknown, as has been the source for the plan for placing them on the campus. Aspirations for Excellence explores the early physical development of the University of Michigan's campus from 1838 to 1880, the designs of architect Alexander Jackson Davis, and the mystery of the sources of the classical buildings. Showcasing the beautiful designs that Davis drew for Michigan, this book provides a view of his career and his place in the development of campus planning and design in America. Many previously unknown documents and unique illustrations have been brought together for the first time in this important collection that tackles issues related to campus planning, history of higher learning institutions, architectural history of the nineteenth century, and the influence of the physical development of college campuses in the 1830s and 1840s on the campus of today. Aspirations for Excellence will be of interest to aficionados of the University of Michigan, as well as scholars in the fields of architecture and architectural history.