The Donkey King

The Donkey King PDF

Author: Emily Selove

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-12-21

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 1009084437

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The 13th-century Arabic grimoire, al-Sakkākī's Kitāb al-Shāmil (Book of the Complete), provides numerous methods of contacting jinn. The first such jinn described, Abū Isrā'īl Būzayn ibn Sulaymān, arrives with a donkey. In the course of offering an explanation for his ritual, this Element reveals the double-sided nature of asinine symbology, and explains why this animal has served as the companion of both demons and prophets. Focusing on two nodes of donkey symbology—the phallus and the bray-it reveals a coincidentia oppositorum in a deceptively humble and comic animal form. Thus, the donkey, bearer of a demonic voice, and of a phallus symbolic of base materiality, also represents transcendence of the material and protection from the demonic. In addition to Arabic literature and occult rituals, the Element refers to evidence from the ancient Near East, Egypt, and Greece, as well as to medieval Jewish and Christian texts.

The Oxford Handbook of Religious Space

The Oxford Handbook of Religious Space PDF

Author:

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 617

ISBN-13: 0190874988

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"How do we understand religious spaces? What is their role or function within specific religious traditions or with respect to religious experience? This handbook brings together thirty-seven authors addressing these questions, using a range of methods to analyze specific spaces or types of spaces around the world and across time. Their methods are grounded in many disciplines: religious studies and religion, anthropology, archaeology, architectural history and architecture, cultural and religious history, sociology, gender and women's studies, geography, and political science, resulting in a distinctly interdisciplinary collection. These essays are snapshots, each offering a specific way to think about the religious space(s) under consideration: Roman shrines, Jewish synagogues, Christian churches, Muslim and Catholic shrines, indigenous spaces in Central America and East Africa, cemeteries, memorials, and others. They are organized here by geographical region rather than tradition, to emphasized the cultural roots of religion and religious spaces. Several overarching principles emerge from these snapshots. The authors demonstrate that religious spaces are simultaneously individual and collective, personal, and social; that they are influenced by culture, tradition, and immediate circumstances; and that they participate in various relationships of power. Most importantly, these essays demonstrate that religious spaces do not simply provide a convenient background for religious action but are also constituent of religious meaning and religious experience, that is, they play an active role in creating, expressing, broadcasting, maintaining, and transforming religious meaning, experience"--

Marrakesh and the Mountains

Marrakesh and the Mountains PDF

Author: Abbey Stockstill

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2024-01-24

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 0271098171

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Over the course of the Almoravid (1040–1147) and Almohad (1121–1269) dynasties, medieval Marrakesh evolved from an informal military encampment into a thriving metropolis that attempted to translate a local and distinctly rural past into a broad, imperial architectural vernacular. In Marrakesh and the Mountains, Abbey Stockstill convincingly demonstrates that the city’s surrounding landscape provided the principal mode of negotiation between these identities. The contours of medieval Marrakesh were shaped in the twelfth-century transition between the two empires of Berber origin. These dynasties constructed their imperial authority through markedly different approaches to urban space, reflecting their respective concerns in communicating complex identities that fluctuated between paradigmatically Islamic and distinctly local. Using interdisciplinary methodologies to reconstruct this urban environment, Stockstill broadens the analysis of Marrakesh’s medieval architecture to explore the interrelated interactions among the city’s monuments and its highly resonant landscape. Marrakesh and the Mountains integrates Marrakesh into the context of urbanism in the wider Islamic world and grants the Almoravid and Almohad dynasties agency over the creation and instantiation of their imperial capital. Lushly illustrated and erudite, Marrakesh and the Mountains is a vital history of this storied Moroccan city. This is a must-have book for scholars specializing in the Almoravid and Almohad eras and a vital volume for students of medieval urbanism, Islamic architecture, and Mediterranean and African studies.

The Wolf King

The Wolf King PDF

Author: Abigail Krasner Balbale

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2023-01-15

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1501765892

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The Wolf King explores how political power was conceptualized, constructed, and wielded in twelfth-century al-Andalus, focusing on the eventful reign of Muhammad ibn Sad ibn Ahmad ibn Mardanīsh (r. 1147–1172). Celebrated in Castilian and Latin sources as el rey lobo/rex lupus and denigrated by Almohad and later Arabic sources as irreligious and disloyal to fellow Muslims because he fought the Almohads and served as vassal to the Castilians, Ibn Mardanīsh ruled a kingdom that at its peak constituted nearly half of al-Andalus and served as an important buffer between the Almohads and the Christian kingdoms of Castile and Aragon. Through a close examination of contemporary sources across the region, Abigail Krasner Balbale shows that Ibn Mardanīsh's short-lived dynasty was actually an attempt to integrate al-Andalus more closely with the Islamic East—particularly the Abbasid caliphate. At stake in his battles against the Almohads was the very idea of the caliphate in this period, as well as who could define righteous religious authority. The Wolf King makes effective use of chronicles, chancery documents, poetry, architecture, coinage, and artifacts to uncover how Ibn Mardanīsh adapted language and cultural forms from around the Islamic world to assert and consolidate power—and then tracks how these strategies, and the memory of Ibn Mardanīsh more generally, influenced expressions of kingship in subsequent periods.

Beloved David—Advisor, Man of Understanding, and Writer

Beloved David—Advisor, Man of Understanding, and Writer PDF

Author: Naftali S. Cohn

Publisher: SBL Press

Published: 2024-06-07

Total Pages: 775

ISBN-13: 1951498992

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This volume brings together the latest scholarship on Jewish literary products and the ways in which they can be interpreted from three different perspectives. In part 1, contributors consider texts as literature, as cultural products, and as historical documents to demonstrate the many ways that early Jewish, rabbinic, and modern secular Jewish literary works make meaning and can be read meaningfully. Part 2 focuses on exegesis of specific biblical and rabbinic texts as well as medieval Jewish poetry. Part 3 examines medieval and early modern Jewish books as material objects and explores the history, functions, and reception of these material objects. Contributors include Javier del Barco, Elisheva Carlebach, Ezra Chwat, Evelyn M. Cohen, Naftali S. Cohn, William Cutter, Yaacob Dweck, Talya Fishman, Steven D. Fraade, Dalia-Ruth Halperin, Martha Himmelfarb, Marc Hirshman, Tamar Kadari, Israel Knohl, Susanne Klingenstein, Katrin Kogman-Appel, Jon D. Levenson, Paul Mandel, Annett Martini, Jordan S. Penkower, Annette Yoshiko Reed, Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, Shalom Sabar, Raymond P. Scheindlin, Seth Schwartz, Sarit Shalev-Eyni, Moshe Simon-Shoshan, Peter Stallybrass, Josef Stern, Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, Elliot R. Wolfson, Azzan Yadin-Israel, and Joseph Yahalom.

Iberian Moorings

Iberian Moorings PDF

Author: Ross Brann

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2021-05-28

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 0812252888

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To Christians the Iberian Peninsula was Hispania, to Muslims al-Andalus, and to Jews Sefarad. As much as these were all names given to the same real place, the names also constituted ideas, and like all ideas, they have histories of their own. To some, al-Andalus and Sefarad were the subjects of conventional expressions of attachment to and pride in homeland of the universal sort displayed in other Islamic lands and Jewish communities; but other Muslim and Jewish political, literary, and religious actors variously developed the notion that al-Andalus or Sefarad, its inhabitants, and their culture were exceptional and destined to play a central role in the history of their peoples. In Iberian Moorings Ross Brann traces how al-Andalus and Sefarad were invested with special political, cultural, and historical significance across the Middle Ages. This is the first work to analyze the tropes of Andalusi and Sefardi exceptionalism in comparative perspective. Brann focuses on the social power of these tropes in Andalusi Islamic and Sefardi Jewish cultures from the tenth through the twelfth century and reflects on their enduring influence and its expressions in scholarship, literature, and film down to the present day.

The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translingualism

The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translingualism PDF

Author: Steven G. Kellman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-09-30

Total Pages: 427

ISBN-13: 1000441512

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Though it might seem as modern as Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad, and Vladimir Nabokov, translingual writing - texts by authors using more than one language or a language other than their primary one - has an ancient pedigree. The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translingualism aims to provide a comprehensive overview of translingual literature in a wide variety of languages throughout the world, from ancient to modern times. The volume includes sections on: translingual genres - with chapters on memoir, poetry, fiction, drama, and cinema ancient, medieval, and modern translingualism global perspectives - chapters overseeing European, African, and Asian languages Combining chapters from lead specialists in the field, this volume will be of interest to scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates interested in investigating the vibrant area of translingual literature. Attracting scholars from a variety of disciplines, this interdisciplinary and pioneering Handbook will advance current scholarship of the permutations of languages among authors throughout time.

Studies in the Medieval Hebrew Tradition of the Ḥarīrīan and Ḥarizian Maqama. Maḥberot Eitan ha-Ezraḥi

Studies in the Medieval Hebrew Tradition of the Ḥarīrīan and Ḥarizian Maqama. Maḥberot Eitan ha-Ezraḥi PDF

Author: Michael Rand

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-10-18

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9004462139

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This work contains a Hebrew and an English section. The former is an edition of the Maḥberot Eitan ha-Ezraḥi, a maqama collection composed after the pattern of al-Ḥarizi’s Taḥkemoni. The edition opens with an introduction, translated at the beginning of the English section. The rest of the English section is devoted to an analysis of that branch of the Hebrew maqama tradition that is rooted in the Maqāmāt of al-Ḥarīrī, starting from a review of the evidence for the presence of the Maqāmāt in the world of Hebrew letters, through the Taḥkemoni, and concluding with the Maḥbarot of Immanuel ha-Romi.

The Song of Songs Through the Ages

The Song of Songs Through the Ages PDF

Author: Annette Schellenberg

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2023-04-27

Total Pages: 613

ISBN-13: 3110750821

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The Song of Songs is a fascinating text. Read as an allegory of God’s love for Israel, the Church, or individual believers, it became one of the most influential texts from the Bible. This volume includes twenty-three essays that cover the Song’s reception history from antiquity to the present. They illuminate the richness of this reception history, paying attention to diverse interpretations in commentaries, sermons, and other literature, as well as the Song’s impact on spirituality, theological and intellectual debates, and the arts.