Browse Items (72 total)

This book originated as a series of papers delivered at a Symposium on Irish and Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture in Honor of J. E. Cross, held in conjunction with the 30th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo in May 1996. The purpose…

For over two millennia, Jewish and Christian theologians have grappled with the biblical notion that God punishes children for the “sins of [their] parents” (Exod. 20:5).1 This doctrine, found in the Decalogue, has posed an obvious question for many…

Judaism is often described as a religion that tolerates, even celebrates arguments with God. Unlike Christianity and Islam, it is said, Judaism endorses a tradition of protest as first expressed in the biblical stories of Abraham, Job, and Jeremiah.…

This study, through focusing on the development of Buddhist rainmaking rites in the Heian era (794-1185), analyzes the efforts of esoteric Buddhist monks to improve their relations with the sovereign and aristocrats of the Japanese court through…

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The Classic Maya of the southern lowlands were one with world rather than one with nature, a view that promoted the conservation of their world for millennia, what I term a cosmology of conservation. I explore how their cosmocentric…

This singular work presents the most comprehensive and nuanced studies available in any Western language of Chinese aesthetic thought and practice during the Six Dynasties (A.D. 220-589). Despite a succession of dynastic and social upheavals, the…

Ibadi Islam is a distinct sect of Islam, neither Sunni nor Shi‘ite, that emerged in the early Islamic period and remains active today in small pockets of North Africa and as the dominant sect of Oman. Despite its antiquity, it has often been…

An Archaeology of the Cosmos　seeks answers to two fundamental questions of humanity and human history. The first question concerns that which some use as a defining element of humanity: religious beliefs. Why do so many people believe in supreme…

“Didymus the Blind was a celebrated Christian instructor in the second half of the fourth century. He was, according to Evagrius of Pontus, the “great and gnostic teacher.” Out of respect for the blind exegete’s interior vision, Jerome dubbed Didymus…

The pursuit of truth is universal; so is the demand for evidence. But the method or system whereby truth is recognized, obtained, and transmitted is not. It is important to distinguish “the will to truth” and “the truth claim”—the specific manners…

“Shukaku Hosshinnō (1150–1202), pronounced Shūkaku at Ninnaji, the second son of cloistered sovereign Go-Shirakawa (r. 1155–1158), was one of the most influential masters in the history of Shingon lineages. Along with the Tendai abbot Jien…

This verse translation of The Play of Adam had its world premiere at The Cloisters (Metropolitan Museum of Art) in New York on December 17-18, 2016. It was restaged and filmed at Illinois in 2017, directed by Kyle A. Thomas. A short documentary about…

The term qing 情 (emotion) has lain at the core of Chinese thinking about literature from antiquity through modern times. It is of profound paradigmatic significance because each major reconceptualization of qing by literary writers and scholars…

What is the force in art, C. Stephen Jaeger asks, that can enter our consciousness, inspire admiration or imitation, and carry a reader or viewer from the world as it is to a world more sublime? We have long recognized the power of individuals to…

The past generation has been an extraordinarily active one in medieval drama scholarship; our appreciation of the range of medieval drama has been significantly broadened, and our understanding of certain medieval genres—most notably, biblical…

Medieval teachers inherited the grammatical and rhetorical pedagogy of antiquity and adapted it to their own needs. Letters came to replace speeches as the predominant target genre for composition instruction, and the model letters found in most…

The epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, attributed to Homer, are among the oldest surviving works of literature derived from oral performance. Deeply embedded in these works is the notion that they were intended to be heard: there is something…

One of the greatest scourges of the later medieval period was plague. While there is a considerable scholarly literature tracing the impact of the dread disease on literature and art, the impermanence of performance has rendered the extension of such…

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Inventions of the Skin considers a crucial aspect of the visual field of the early modern stage: the painted body of the actor. Organized as a series of studies, the four chapters of this book examine goldface and divinity in York’s…