BRILL
Japanese warrior prints 1646-1905.
The history of this inventive genre is traced in a well-conceived and thorough catalog of 219 examples, arranged chronologically into six sections, and selected according to broad themes. The prints appear in full-page color plates of superb quality in an oversize format (10x12 inches). The entry accompanying each plate describes the scene, giving the story it depicts, details about the print's creator, and, frequently, the connections with theatre of the scene's depiction or costumes. Many of the prints include poems, which are given in the entries in English and the Japanese original. An introduction describes the history of the genre. This volume is a model of excellent book design and production. Hotei is an imprint of Brill. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The Jews in Sicily; v.11: Notaries of Palermo; pt. 2.
Picking up where he left off at the end of the first volume, Simonsohn (emeritus Jewish history, Tel Aviv U.) continues compiling notarial deeds drawn up by public notaries in Palermo and elsewhere to cast light on the economic, social, and religious history of the Jewish minority on the Mediterranean island over their three final centuries there. Most of them are in English translation, but a few in the original Latin. People, places, and subjects are indexed. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Koguryo, the language of Japan's continental relatives; an introduction to the historical-comparative study...., 2d ed.
Beckwith (Uralic and Altaic studies, Indiana University) studies the extinct Koguryo language, which was once spoken in Manchuria and northern Korea. He traces the ethnolinguistic history of the Koguryo nation, and offers a philological treatment of the sources for the language. Special attention is paid to the theory and practice of lexically based historical-comparative linguistics. The genetic relationship of Koguryo to Japanese is shown to be secure, unlike the non-relationship of either language to Korean or 'Altaic,' and much light is shed on the ethnolinguistic origins of Japanese. The special phonological features of the underlying transcriptional language, the archaic northeastern Middle Chinese dialect once spoken in Korea, are also analyzed. A complete glossary of all Archaic Koguryo and Old Koguryo words is included. This second edition is free of the typographical errors, caused by computer file and printing incompatibility, which marred the first edition. The author has also added new interpretations in some areas, and new sources to the bibliography. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Land of dreams; Greek and Latin studies in honour of A.H.M. Kessels.
Inspired by the career of their mentor and friend, the authors of these 28 essays pay due attention to Kessels's interest in classical drama, the reception of Homer, early Greek and later Latin writings and the role of the dream in classical literature. The topics of such dreams vary from trauma and suicide to glory and rebirth, the dramas include several considerations of Sophocles, declaration of love and a thwarted burial, and Homer receives his due from the literary critics of the Hellenistic age up to myth-makers about blindness in the present. Isocrates, Plutarch and Diogenes of Oenoanda emerge from early Greek literature, along with the Bodleian papyrus purported to contain correspondence between Jesus and Abgar, and late Latin writers are represented by such as Ovid and Polybius. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The language of literature; linguistic approaches to classical texts.
The 11 essays are intended to further the convergence between literary and linguistic approaches to classical texts that has been in swing for the past two decades. Classicists mostly from the Netherlands offer views on such topics as Pythian 10 and Olympian 3 as examples of mythical chronology in the odes of Pindar, aspectual differences and narrative techniques in Xenophon's Hellenica and Agesilaus, and a pragmatic explanation for adjective ordering in Herodotus. Most of the Greek and Latin quotations are followed by English translation. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Le commerce du coton en Méditerranée à la fin du Moyen Age.
Nam (history, Dongguk U.) looks closely at the cotton trade in the Mediterranean in the late Middle Ages to better understand the movement of people and materials within maritime commerce. He traces consumption patterns of commercially traded cotton products, from luxury items down to cheap goods, and the nature of the products themselves, from standard clothing down to byproducts. He then examines the means of production in Syria, Turkey and Egypt and areas in the Occident, the transport of cotton and its products to Venice, France and Spain, and its processing in factories in Italy and Barcelona. He concludes that given the number of workers involved in the industry, the level of investment in infrastructure, the development of financial instruments, and the production rates, international trade of cotton was significant in the early development of the region. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Leisure, pleasure and healing; spa culture and medicine in the ancient eastern Mediterranean.
Investigating therapeutic sites in the Levant from the Biblical through the Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, and early Muslim times, Dvorjetski (history, Oxford Brookes U.) asks whether they serve as models for social interaction, especially mutual cultural influences between pagans, Christians, and Jews; and whether they served as sacred cult places or popular sites of healing, immorality, and debauchery. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Les manuscrits araméens du Wadi Daliyeh et la Samarie vers 450-332 av. j.-c.
Dusek (Charles U., Prague, the Czech Republic) provides a complete transcription and an exhaustive analysis of the Aramaic manuscript fragments of the Wadi Daliyeh, dated to the 4th century BCE (the Second Temple period). B&w plates of the manuscript fragments are included. The text is in French. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The lower stratum families in the Neo-Assyrian period.
Galil (Jewish history, U. of Haifa) here considers families in the low stratum of Neo-Assyrian society, that is, people who were engaged in productive labor and did not own the means of production. He begins by examining the sources; surveying the types of lower-stratum families; and explaining the terminology, the formulation of the texts, and the status of the people. Then he delves into economic and demographic features of the families, from such perspectives as family size, children's age, single-parent families, and number of generations in the family. A second volume will cover the middle stratum — which did productive work and owned the means of production — and the higher stratum, which only exploited the productive work of the lower stratum. The CiP data shows class instead of stratum. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The lure of anti-Semitism; hatred of Jews in present-day France.
Wieviorka (sociology, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris), with a team of researchers, examines tangible data, such as assaults and attacks, problems specific to schools, tendencies and incidents that rouse the public sphere and political-intellectual life, and the discourse of the far right. Only names are indexed. La tentation antisémite: haine des Juifs dans la France d'aujourd'hui was published in 2005 by Editions Robert Laffont, Paris, and was translated by Kristin Couper Lobel and Anna Declerck. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Mapping the New Testament; Early Christian writings as a witness for Jewish Biblical exegesis.
How can the New Testament be used for creating a fuller picture of Second Temple Jewish exegesis? Ruzer (comparative religion, Hebrew University) studies the link between the exegetical trends current in various Second Temple Jewish circles and patterns of New Testament conversation with Jewish scripture. He complements the standard focus on Jewish background of Christianity with an alternative direction: the mapping of New Testament evidence as the early witness to more general trends attested in their fully developed form later in rabbinic literature. He deals with a variety of samples from different layers of the New Testament tradition: Synoptic Gospels, Pauline Epistles, and Acts. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Martin Luther and Islam; a study in sixteenth-century polemics and apologetics.
While kings and generals worried about the military threat of the Ottoman Empire and the armies of Sultan Suleyman (1520-66) in the Balkans, Luther (1483-1546) worried that Islam would lure Christians from their faith. Francisco (theology, Concordia Theological Seminary, Indiana) examines the Protestant reformer's critique of Islam and defense of Christianity, finding them to be more theological and apologetic then is generally acknowledged. The study began as his 2006 doctoral dissertation at the University of Oxford. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Marx's scientific dialectics; a methodological treatise for a new century.
Aside from those who reject Marx's analysis because he came to the wrong conclusion, many scholars consider his work to be limited to the political economic realm. Paolucci (sociology, Eastern Kentucky U.) sets out to show that Marx understood the standards of science in general and incorporated its method within his work. Once the features peculiar to economics are separated from the purely scientific, he argues, Marx's methods can be applied to other social sciences. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Mediating the divine; prophecy and revelation in the Dead Sea scrolls and Second Temple Judaism.
In a revision of his 2006 dissertation at New York University, Jassen (early Judaism, U. of Minnesota) argues that while the prophetic scriptural canon at Qumran — the role of biblical prophets in pesher literature and the para-biblical prophetic texts — have been widely studied, considerably less scholarly attention has been paid to the sectarian attitudes toward prophecy. He asks how the Qumran community mediated the divine word and will, and finds that it mostly rewrote ancient prophetic experience, anticipated a new period of prophetic experience during the coming eschatological age, and viewed itself as heir to the ancient prophetic tradition. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Narrative and identity; an ethical reading of Exodus 4.
More of the Old Testament relates to modern schools of thought and social movements than many know. For example, Exodus 4:18-26 might be interpreted as a curious reflection of global thinking and an account of an attendant reverse migration by Moses. Gorospe (Old Testament, Asian Theological Seminary, Manila) takes a new, interdisciplinary approach to this puzzling passage, particularly Ricoeur's theories of narrative and identity, to find deeper meaning. She ably explains Ricoeur's precepts and her use and adaptation of them, sets the contexts for the passage, analyzes the passage in the broader narrative and specific details, then works through her analysis in terms of its new ethical possibilities. Gorospe closes with a startling and inspiring conclusion. The result is new scholarship, a call for more interdisciplinary studies of this extremely high quality and a model for others to follow. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Narrative of the Anabaptist madness; the overthrow of Münster, the famous metropolis of Westphalia; 2v.
In 1534, a variety of Anabaptists took over the German city of Münster, instituted polygamy and a form of collective ownership, elected a Dutch tailor as king, and held out against siege and attacks for over a year. Schoolmaster Kerssenbrock was a child in the city at the time of the kingdom, and wrote a history of it three decades later, and from the perspective of a committed Catholic. His account has highly influenced subsequent scholarship, though neither the original Latin nor the poor German translation is much read. Mackay (history and classics, U. of Alberta) thought it was time to make the work available to English speakers. He does not spend time explaining how Kerssenbrock diverges from more reliable sources of information. The two volumes are numbered consecutively. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Nomads in eastern Tibet; social organization and economy of a pastoral estate in the kingdom of Dege.
Huber (Tibetan studies, Humbolt U.) has edited and updated Thagyal's 1985 masters thesis in social anthropology at the University of Oslo, and provided a substantial introduction placing the study in the context of current scholarship. In addition to providing information about pre-modern pastoralism in Dege, he says, it reveals how a native anthropologist, in exile and with a very different perspective than his own community, presents and analyzes his society of origin within two decades of its demise. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
On the cusp of an era; art in the pre-Kusana world.
No book has been produced before on pre-Kusana art, and Srinivasan (State U. of New York-Stony Brook) attributes that to the fact that no full-length study has been done of Kusana art — as opposed to art done during the Kusana period — that pre-Kusana art would have preceded. Contributors identified only by name take the plunge anyway, discussing general features and specific examples of art in South Asia about the beginning of the Christian era. Their topics include Saka and Kusana migrations in historical contexts, an Indo-Greek urban center in Gandhara, coinage from Iran to Gandhara, and multi-cultural systems in ancient India. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Order from disorder; Proclus' doctrine of evil and its roots in ancient Platonism.
Phillips (classics and philosophy, U. of Tennessee-Chattanooga) does not question the Neoplatonist credentials of Proclus, but argues that a thorough study of his doctrine of evil must go beyond examination of his late monograph to include many relevant texts from his earlier treatises. He also believes that Proclus' doctrine offers a good vantage point from which to assess the tradition of questions regarding the origin of evil and its mode of existence as treated throughout Platonism from ancient times. Earlier versions of chapters and parts of chapters have been presented orally and published. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The origin of the Indo-Iranians.
The middle of the second millennium BC witnessed the first mention of Indo-Iranian people and of names in its language. Kuz'mina (archaeology, Russian Institute for Cultural Research, Moscow) explores how the group split from other Indo-European speakers to become a distinct people, later itself split into several sub-groups. She draws on written evidence, linguistic data, and archaeological sources concerning the material culture of the group and its parts. She also considers anthropological sources. This study is a complete revision of her Where Do Indo-Aryans Come From?, published in 1994 in Russian. She warns that no arrangement of evidence points reliably to an original homeland. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
