غایتشناسی نقد و تصحیح متون

The manuscripts preserved acts as valuable treasure of knowledge which can be utilized for the wellbeing of present generation as well as to pass on to the next generation. A thorough study on Deepika and Gudartha Deepika commentaries on Lolimbaraja's Vaidya jeevana, present in the form of manuscript in oriental research institute libraries has been brought much information that is new for present understanding. The present study focuses on treatment aspects of various diseases and preparation of yogas with easy available drugs in present clinical practice and better development of Ayurvedic practices. The study is based on the technical method of critical edition in order to update & conserve the medical knowledge dealt in Deepika and Gudartha Deepika commentaries on Lolimbaraja's Vaidya jeevana. Objective: 1. To collect and decipher two important commentaries on Lolimbarajas vaidya Jeevana 2. To collate and critically edit the two important commentaries on Lolibarajs Vaidya Jeevana to know their contributions. Methodology: The study is based on seven plus five (total 12) manuscripts and all were in Devanagari script and their details are as below. 1. R-1 to R 7 are - Obtained from BORI, Pune : Acession numbers as - 1093/ 1886-92, 463/ 1895-98, 353/ 1879-80, 948/ 1891-95, 178/ 1882-83, 618/ Vi¾-1, 306/ Vi¾.1 2. H-1 to H 4 are -Obtained from BORI, Pune; Accession numbers as- 462/1895-98, 913/ 1887-91, 635/ 1895-1902, 238.B/ A 1883-84 and IX 3. H-5 - Obtained from Zen library, Arrah, Bihar; Accession number 76/42. Digitization of manuscripts, editing and analysis of mutual relationship among collected copies of Manuscripts, transliteration of all extant of copies selected for Critical edition and Critical Edition with English Translation of the Text is being done. Conclusion By observing all internal and external evidences, Deepika by Rudrabhatta and Gudartha Deepika by Harinatha Goswami are the well known commentaries on Lolimbaraja’s Vaidya jeevana pertaining to early and late 17th CAD respectively. These all contributions enhance the richness of Ayurveda in modern era. KEYWORDS: Critical edition, Deepika, Rudrabhatta, Gudartha Deepika, Goswami Harinatha, Vaidya Jeevana, etc.

Muslim scholars in Islamic studies have often been characterized bywestern scholars of religion as a "conservative group" (Martin 1985). Thischarge is brought against them because of their reluctance to adopt thetheories and methodologies of the science of religion in their approach tothe study of Islam and Muslim societies. I would like to outline threemajor factors responsible for the "conservatism" of contemporary Muslimscholars in an attempt to contribute to an understanding of their pition.The fitst is concerned with objectives, the second with history, while thethird deals with approaches.Objectives: For Muslim scholars, the acquisition and imparting of knowledgehas to be purposeful and meaningful. They do not subscribe to thephilosophy of pursuing knowledge for its own sake. Any study of Islamor of Muslim society must of necessity be goal oriented. The essentialdistinction between the approaches of contemporary western scholars ofIslam and those of Muslim scholars can be attributed to their respectivegoals. For western scholars, the purpose of Islamic studies is primarily toincrease the understanding of Islam, its people, culture, society, and civilization.For Muslim scholars, the purpose is not only to produce graduateswell-versed in various aspects of Muslim history, cultwe, and civilization,but also to equip them to tackle or solve contemporary problems facingMuslim societies (Sardar 1983). It must be expected, therefore, that Muslimscholars will remain reluctant to adopt new approaches as long asthey are convinced that they serve no practical purpose.The Historical Factor: This has to do primarily with the historical roleof the orientalists. Muslim scholars acknowledge that the early generationof orientalists rendered useful services to Arabic and Islamic scholarship,especially through their critical edition and publication of manuscripttexts (Tibawi 1979; Jameelah 1971). However, the scholarly output oforientalism on the whole leaves much to be desired. In the precolonialera, it was characterized by abusive polemics and false representation(Said 1978; Jameelah 197 l), which the subsequent European occupationof Muslim lands aggravated even further. The reason for this misrepresentationwas that those who wrote on Islam were scholars of Biblical, theological,or linguistic studies and not of Islam. It was not uncommon fortheir only contact with Islam to be the result of military or missionaryactivity or residence in a Muslim region. Most of their writings could beViews and Comments 28 1described as "speculative," their characteristic features being that Biblicaltradition provided the norm for Islam and that western civilization providedthe norm for Islamic civilization (Manzoor 1986).This theologically reductionist approach, in which Islam was understoodwithin a western Christian paradigm, lasted until the middle of theeighteenth century (A1 Fiiriiqi 1989). In recent years, not only the authoritybut even the very institution of orientalism has been challenged bymany prominent scholars of Islam, such as A. L. Tibawi, S. H. Alatas, A.Abdel Malek, Tala1 Asad, Abdallah Laroui, and Edward Said (Said 1985).However, while the orientalist approach has by and large been discredited,Muslim scholats remain suspicious about the intentions of contemporarywestern scholars of Islam. Naturally, this suspicion makes themreluctant to consider new approaches suggested by these scholars.Approaches: Muslim scholars can identify with the religionist approachwhich developed in the nineteenth century. This approach accepts theexistence of the "other" realm, concedes the possibility of interaction withspiritual beings, and describes humanity as religious by nature.However, they have serious problems with the naturalistic approachthat developed in the nineteenth century. This view holds that religiousphenomena can be studied via nomothetic methods, because the subjectmatter of religion is the of same type as that of natural science.' Muslimscholars reject this approach, for its focus is on empirical elements inreligion, such as buildings, rituals, and texts, and cannot "do justice to theexperience of transcendental realities" (Mostert 1980). Science also doesnot pay attention to personal awareness and intuition (Wiebe 1980).Furthermore, the basic assumptions of science are that every event innatm is determined by prior natural events and that the character of thisdeterminism can be discerned through scientific investigation (Glock andStark 1966). Science accepts only those "truths" which are logically orempirically determinable. For Islam, intuition, personal awareness, and thetranscendent reality are vital.2 Moreover, Islam teaches that human beingsare responsible for their own actions3 and that the human personality doesnot consist only of "natural" or physical elements observable by thesenses, but also of a "spiritual" element without which a proper understandingof religious phenomena is not possible ...

The object of study in the article is the Icelandic “Book of the Settlement of the Land,” created in the 13th century, and the history of its study by humanities scholars in Iceland during the 19th-21st centuries. The initial settlement of Iceland is not only an object of interest for Icelandic science, it also has enormous symbolic and emotional importance for the bearers of modern Icelandic culture, therefore it has served as the theme of works of art and has become an integral part of the Icelandic national identity. The perception of the “Book of the Settlement of the Land”, as well as the icelandic sagas related to it textually, by the Icelandic scientific community of the 19th-21st centuries. can be described as a movement from unconditional acceptance on faith by the national romantics of the 19th century to increasingly growing skepticism in the 20th century, to recognition of its source study importance in the modern era - with the caveat that now other questions are being raised about this source. In modern Icelandic scholarship, it is impossible to single out any one dominant approach to the study of Old Icelandic prose; Cultural anthropology and “new textual criticism” are common, as are many interdisciplinary studies. However, in our opinion, insufficient attention has been and is being given to the study of Old Icelandic texts in a historical and ethnographic vein. This article opens a series of studies examining the “Book of the Settlement of the Land” and the corresponding sagas of the West Fjords mainly in the historical and ethnographic aspect, and the stories of each pioneer open up new aspects of this topic. When comparing the text of the “Book of the Settlement of the Land” with the texts of the icelandic sagas, in contrast to the established thesis that the “authors” of the sagas, using the brief information of the “Book of the Settlement of the Land,” composed the sagas themselves, we put forward the postulate that everything happened exactly the opposite.

This provocation argues for a form of digital creative-critical editing to serve as a pragmatic complement to the dominant “depth” models of traditional scholarly editing. What results is a pan-relational praxis of editing that focuses on connecting edited texts to new contexts and literary experiences with new tools, instead of using a depth model to offer the correct description, representation, or data model of those texts. Creative textual criticism could then be considered ongoing and incomplete, partaking of an iterative process of close reading and distant analysis, and redescriptions of textual criticism that are embedded in the creative process and other aesthetic experiences. These ideas are demonstrated in three brief exhibitions of Thomas Hardy, Herman Melville, and the abolitionist Mary Anne Rawson, all of whom are loosely connected to Arthur Schopenhauer, who once posited in Counsels and Maxims that “Experience of the world may be looked upon as a kind of text, to which reflection and knowledge form the commentary”. Such “commentary” inspires a new mode of pan-relational “reflection” and networked discourse which can only be implemented with digital technologies. What digital editing can do, then, is to give space to competing and alternative discourses and processes of the same text and to connect that text to other aesthetic contexts.

Already the first, only sparse editions of Mozart’s Church Music brought about considerable changes within musical notation. In some cases the works have even been reduced to vocal parts along with piano score. Remote from the original text habits of performance practice developed, started to circulate and to strengthen. Compared with this the volumes of the (Old) Mozart Edition could hardly stand their ground in the 1870s and 1880s, so that on the basis of a (with regard to textual criticism) corrupt notation an autonomous Mozart- tradition in Church Music revealed itself and has been maintained by a long way up to the 20th century. By means of some smaller works of Church Music (the offertorios Misericordias Domini and Venite, populi , the motet Ave verum Corpus ) it will be shown how a process of alienation and reapproaching took place and why aspects of later reception shall be of some importance when editing musical works of the classical era. (Italian translation by Adriana De Feo).

This paper explores part of the history of those Arabic Bible manuscripts that traveled to Europe in the early modern period, focusing on Arabic manuscripts of the Pauline Epistles. These manuscripts played an important role in European scholarship about the Arabic Bible, Arabic teaching and learning in Europe, and textual criticism. When one looks at early European scholarship on the Pauline Epistles in Arabic in the 16th and 17th centuries, it is very noticeable that, by and large, it restricted itself to an examination of a single version. In this paper, I reconstruct the history of the three earliest manuscripts of this version to be studied in European scholarship: MS Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ar. 23; MS Leiden, Universitaire Bibliotheken Leiden, Or. 217; and MS Leiden, Universitaire Bibliotheken Leiden, Acad. 2. By tracing the history, I analyze the impact of this version, and it becomes clear how this version became, for a while, a standard version, what we might call the “Vulgate” of the Arabic Bible in Europe.

This paper explores part of the history of those Arabic Bible manuscripts that traveled to Europe in the early modern period, focusing on Arabic manuscripts of the Pauline Epistles. These manuscripts played an important role in European scholarship about the Arabic Bible, Arabic teaching and learning in Europe, and textual criticism. When one looks at early European scholarship on the Pauline Epistles in Arabic in the 16th and 17th centuries, it is very noticeable that, by and large, it restricted itself to an examination of a single version. In this paper, I reconstruct the history of the three earliest manuscripts of this version to be studied in European scholarship: MS Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ar. 23; MS Leiden, Universitaire Bibliotheken Leiden, Or. 217; and MS Leiden, Universitaire Bibliotheken Leiden, Acad. 2. By tracing the history, I analyze the impact of this version, and it becomes clear how this version became, for a while, a standard version, what we might call the “Vulgate” of the Arabic Bible in Europe.

The curriculum of Islamic education has evolved over time, from the classical era to the modern era. In the classical era, there was a scholar who pioneered the Islamic education system, namely Ibn Sahnun. In the modern era, there is Syed Naquib al-Attas, who upholds the Islamization of knowledge. This study aims to discuss whether the content of the curriculum in classical Islamic education designed by Ibn Sahnun and the modern curriculum designed by Al-Attas synergize with each other in terms of the levels of knowledge studied. Furthermore, if we relate it to the Independent Curriculum program currently promoted by the government, is it relevant and compatible with the curriculum designs of these two figures, Ibn Sahnun and Al-Attas? This study employs a descriptive comparative research method and an in-depth analysis of the literature related to these two figures to examine the relevance of their ideas with the Independent Curriculum initiated by the government. The results of this study found that there is compatibility between the classical and modern Islamic education curriculum and the Independent Curriculum in four aspects: first, the aspect of freedom in learning; second, the aspect of attention; third, the aspect of flexibility; and fourth, the aspect of cooperation. This also concludes that there is relevance between the Independent Curriculum and the Islamic education curriculum designed by Al-Attas and Ibn Sahnun regarding compulsory learning related to the Qur'an as the main foundation before understanding other subjects, especially social sciences.Abstrak: Kurikulum pendidikan Islam mengalami perkembangan dari masa ke masa yaitu dari era klasik sampai pada era modern. Pada era klasik, terdapat ulama yang menjadi pelopor sistem pendidikan Islam yaitu Ibnu Sahnun. Kemudian pada era modern terdapat Syed Naquib al-Attas yang menjunjung tinggi islamisasi ilmu pengetahuan. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk membahas tentang apakah muatan materi yang terdapat dalam kurikulum pendidikan Islam era klasik rancangan Ibnu Sahnun dan kurikulum era modern rancangan Al-Attas memiliki sinergisitas satu sama lain dalam aspek tingkatan keilmuan yang dipelajari? Kemudian jika ditarik dengan program kurikulum merdeka yang sedang digencarkan oleh pemerintah pada saat ini apakah relevan dan memiliki kesesuaian dengan rancangan kurikulum dua tokoh tersebut yaitu Ibnu Sahnun dan Al-Attas? Penelitian ini menggunakan metode penelitian deskriptif komparatif serta analisis yang mendalam terhadap literatur-literatur yang berkaitan dengan kedua tokoh tersebut untuk melihat relevansi gagasan ide kedua tokoh tersebut dengan kurikulum merdeka yang diinisiasi oleh pemerintah. Hasil penelitian ini menemukan bahwa terdapat kesesuaian antara kurikulum pendidikan Islalm era klalsik dan era modern dengan kurikulum merdeka pada empat aspek yaitu: pertama, aspek kebebasan dalam belajar; kedua, aspek memperhatikan; ketiga, aspek fleksibilitas; dan keempat, aspek gotong royong. Hal ini juga memberikan kesimpulan bahwa terdapat relevansi antara kurikululm merdeka dengan kurikulum pendidikan Islam yang dirancang oleh Al-Attas daln Ibnu Sahnun mengenai pembelajaran wajib yang berkenaan dengan Al-Qur’an menjadi dasar utama sebelum memahami materi-materi lain terutama ilmul-ilmul sosial.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5915/23-2-15083 The period of the 9th to 13th centuries is regarded as a golden period of Muslim history during which Muslims had established the most powerful empire and had produced the most brilliant physicians, scientists and scholars. These scholars made their original contributions and significant additions to existing scientific knowledge. In Cordoba (Qurtubah) and other cities of Spain, Muslim scholars established some of the most renowned universities where European scholars came to learn. Muslim scholars achieved excellence in all sciences, including but not limited to, mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, chemistry and medicine. They established general hospitals with speciality units, defined criteria for admission to medical schools and described characteristics of a competent physician. Christian scholars subsequently translated the most valuable material from Arabic to Latin and these books served as standard textbooks in European universities for several centuries. The Muslim contributions became the basis of culture, scientific and technological achievement which has had a lasting influence on the world. I do hope that the knowledge of the work done by the Muslim scholars during the 9th to 13th centuries period will serve as a source of inspiration to current and future Muslim generations. Presented at the IMA 23rd Annual Convention Nerja, Spain, June 1990.

In his 1955 survey of Jewish-Arab relations, 'Jews and Arabs: Their Contacts through the Ages,' S.D. Goitein, a leading scholar of Jewish history in the Medieval Islamic lands, gives almost no attention to the Later Islamic Middle Period (thirteenth-fifteenth century). In fact, Goitein concluded that in the thirteenth century “Arabs faded out from world history, and Oriental Jews from Jewish history.” Thus, he did not consider the history of Jews in the Islamic lands to be of any significance until the modern era (starting in 1800, according to his periodization). Islamic and Jewish histories were perceived to be intertwined in the pre-thirteenth century into what Goitein called ‘Jewish-Arab symbiosis,’ an idea that has been much popularized in later scholarship as the ‘Judeo-Muslim symbiosis.’ In this paradigm, Jews and Muslims achieved the highest intellectual, cultural, and scientific achievements due to the tolerant character of the ‘Arab’ Muslim rule, a character that was lost gradually due to the rise to power of non-Arab peoples within the Islamic lands (the Mamluks in Egypt and Syria, and the Almohads in the Islamic West). This dissertation wishes to challenge the ‘decline theory’ regarding Jewish life in the ‘post-classical’ era of Islam through the examination of three treatises from Egypt and the Maghrib. It argues that traditional periodization of Islamic history affected the historiography of Jewish life under medieval Islam, and that by studying the ‘Jewish-Arab symbiosis’ outside the confines of ‘classical’ Islam, a different image of medieval Jewish history could be reconstructed.

The rabbinic sages of late antiquity are known for their sophisticated and creative reading of Scripture, but rabbinic literature also includes elaborate commentary on another kind of text: the sages’ own teachings. This book argues that the development of this commentary, later called Talmud, transformed the sages’ self-perception and intellectual world. By studying the first collection of commentary on rabbinic teachings, the often neglected and difficult Talmud Yerushalmi, and comparing it with earlier rabbinic texts, this study shows how ancient Talmudic scholars presented a new understanding of these teachings: they saw them as the products of individual sages and as resulting from problem-fraught processes of composition and transmission. To examine these aspects, these ancient scholars introduced new types of arguments and reading strategies, such as attribution analysis and textual criticism, into the study of Torah. The result was not only a new understanding of rabbinic teachings, but also a body of scholarship that was decidedly different from rabbinic scholarship on Scripture, since it engaged precisely the type of critical inquiries that rabbinic readings of Scripture avoided. This new perspective on the first Talmud allows us not only to paint a richer picture of rabbinic hermeneutics and interpretive practices, but also to situate ancient Talmudic scholarship among other scholarly traditions of the Greco-Roman world and examine the ways that different ideas, aims, and contexts shape textual scholarship—including our own.

Reviewed by: The Annotated Book in the Early Middle Ages: Practices of Reading and Writing ed. by Mariken Teeuwen, and Irene Van Renswoude Gaelle Bosseman Teeuwen, Mariken, and Irene Van Renswoude, eds, The Annotated Book in the Early Middle Ages: Practices of Reading and Writing (Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 38), Turnhout, Brepols, 2017; hardback; pp. xii, 783; 41 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. €140.00; ISBN 9782503569482. This edited collection of papers is focused on studying the practice of annotation in medieval manuscripts, with examples ranging from late antiquity to the thirteenth century. It comes as the result of a conference held in The Hague in 2015 but additionally displays a wealth of research led by a team of Dutch scholars involved in the project 'Marginal Scholarship: The Practice of Learning in the Early Middle Ages (c. 800–c. 1000)' under the supervision of Mariken Teeuwen. The main purpose of the project was to decentre the gaze from the text to its edges, the marginalia, in order to consider 'the responses of the readers to text' (p. 2) and to study the intellectual work at stake behind them. The book gathers twenty-five contributions by specialists from all over the world, nearly all written in English, and divided into four parts: 'Scholars and Their Books: Practices and Methods of Annotating'; 'Textual Scholarship by Means of Annotation'; 'Private Study and Classroom Reading'; 'Annotating Orthodox and Heterodox Knowledge'. With the aim of offering an overall approach despite the disparity of case-studies, the editors diligently included general indices and a list of illustrations that allow readers to navigate between contributions. The introduction provides a general overview and explains the coherence of the sections; it also supplies a brief historiographical survey, complemented by an initial contribution by Mariken Teeuwen. She presents the database that her team built (<https://database.marginalscholarship.nl>), [End Page 288] consisting of a searchable interface that gathers observations on annotated manuscripts as a tool for systematic research. In contrast, several contributions show how the detailed study of one manuscript (chapters by Giorgia Vocino, Luciana Cuppo) or one author (chapters by Giacomo Vignodelli, Warren Pezé) may allow us to identify a milieu of production and investigate characteristic practices of intellectual history. The first part illustrates the diversity of the forms of marginalia, which encompass notes, letters, or symbols (Evina Steinová), whereas the three last sections introduce the reader to the variety of their functions or uses. The second part is dedicated to annotations used for text-criticism or editorial purpose. Thanks to marginalia, medieval scholars could correct or supplement texts, indicating for instance their sources (notably through stenographic notes, as studied by Martin Hellmann) or textual variants, a practice that, with its roots in late antiquity (Franck Cinato), was the object of erudite renewal under the Carolingians (Markus Schiegg). This practice created upgraded editions or critical editions (Erik Kwakkel, Alberto Cevolini). Attention to the text transmission is also illustrated by the care with which copyists preserved some lacunae in texts, scrupulously following their models (Justin Stover). The third part deals with annotations assisting study and reading tasks, notably for schooling purposes (Anna Grotans, Ad Van Els), although in some cases the tangle of notes and paratextual additions indicates an evolution of their functions throughout the life of the manuscript (Silvia Ottaviano) and eventually challenges the traditional definition of a classical schoolbook (Paulina Taraskin). Finally, the fourth part gathers contributions examining annotations to theological texts, such as signs of censure (Irene Van Renswoude), critical notes on patristic texts (Janneke Raajmakers, Pierre Chambert-Protat), reading aids (Jesse Keskiaho), or 'visual paratexts', that is, images and elements of mise en page (Patrizia Carmassi). Margins can also be the site of or summarize exegetical and patristic traditions as in annotated Bibles (Cinzia Grifoni). The diversity of case-studies presented in this volume highlights the continuity of the practice of annotation in the Middle Ages as well as the diversity of its media: all kinds of texts could receive notes or reading marks. If in general they manifest a practical and intellectual use, in some cases the function of marginalia remains uncertain, as for instance the addition of single letters in interlinear space...

Throughout Antiquity, Greeks and Romans interpreted, analyzed, and evaluated the texts of poets and prose writers. They formulated ideas about the nature of poetry, its effects, and its function in society. They also developed theories on the effective composition of prose texts, and they commented on the style of orators, historians, and philosophers. All these different activities can be summarized in the notion of “ancient literary criticism.” Literary criticism was not a separate discipline in Antiquity. Greek and Roman ideas on what we call “literature” (i.e., poems as well as texts of oratory, history, and philosophy) are found in many different kinds of texts (dialogues, epistles, treatises, commentaries, poems) that were produced in various intellectual contexts. Four of these contexts are relevant, in particular: poetry, philosophy, rhetoric, and scholarship. From its beginnings in the Homeric epics, Greek poetry reflected on its own nature, value, and function. Latin poetry was concerned with similar issues: Horace’s Ars Poetica is both a poem and one of the most influential texts of ancient criticism. Throughout Antiquity, poetry provoked all kinds of responses from philosophers. On the one hand, the relationship between poetry and philosophy was framed in terms of a conflict between competing traditions: Xenophanes notoriously objects to the poets’ presentation of gods, and Plato problematizes the mimetic nature of poetry in his Republic. On the other hand, philosophers made extensive use of poetic forms and developed theories of poetry: no critical text from Antiquity has been so influential as Aristotle’s Poetics. Rhetoric is another ancient discipline that is closely connected with literary criticism. In Greek and Roman teaching, students were continuously stimulated to read, study, and analyze the classical texts from the past, which formed the models of stylistic imitation and emulation. By consequence, the rhetorical treatises composed by such teachers as Demetrius, Dionysius, and Quintilian include numerous evaluative observations on specific passages of classical prose and poetry. Finally, there is the tradition of ancient scholarship that came to flourish in the Hellenistic period, most famously in Alexandria and Pergamum. The commentaries of Alexandrian scholars contained observations on literary (stylistic) aspects of the classical texts, which partly and indirectly survive in collections of scholia. This article offers a basic orientation to the study of ancient literary criticism. It lists general historical overviews, introductions to ancient criticism and related disciplines (rhetoric, philosophy, ancient scholarship, aesthetics), essential literature on the most influential critics and schools of criticism (including translations, commentaries, and studies), as well as important discussions of some general issues and concepts of ancient literary criticism.

In the present paper, I want to question how much the genuinely dramatic cultural changes which are going on around us are a real departure from previous trends, and to the extent that they are, whether this is part of a social transformation sufficiently basic to warrant an argument that modernity is dead or dying. I will argue generally against the postmodernist view. Though changes are real and major, they do not yet amount to an epochal break. Indeed, many of them reflect continuing tensions and pressures which have characterized the whole modern era. Underlying my account of the problems of the claim that postmodernity is upon us, is the counterclaim that the two basic organizing forces in modernity--capitalism and bureaucratic power--have hardly begun to dissolve. Rather than narrowing our notion of the modern in order to justify the use of the prefix post, I will argue that we need to incorporate the insights of postmodernist thinkers into a richer sociological approach to the entire modern era. In the first part of the paper, I will very briefly and sketchily introduce the notion of a postmodern condition. Since this is a position argued by a variety of thinkers on somewhat different grounds, and since some scholars--like Foucault--are claimed as part of the movement though they never proclaimed themselves postmodernists, my sketch will inevitably conceal a good deal of complexity.... Constrained by space not to go into all the ramifications of the postmodernist argument or its implications for sociology, in the second part of this paper I will take up one particular instance. This is the conceptualization of social movements. It is an advantageous one for discussion because it links nearly all the different discourses contributing to the postmodernist potpourri, and has been a topic of discussion outside of the postmodernist debate as well. As in my more general treatment of postmodernism, I want to argue here that novelty is being overstated, and the modern era itself being poorly conceptualized by a picture which flattens out its own internal diversity. The new social movements appear to be quite new, in other words, only because they are understood through a contrast to a one-sided, hypostatized account of the old labor movement.

Reviewed by: Theios Sophistes: Essays on Flavius Philostratus' Vita Apollonii James A. Francis Kristoffel Demoen and Danny Praet (eds.). Theios Sophistes: Essays on Flavius Philostratus' Vita Apollonii. Mnemosyne Supplements, 305. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Pp. xvi, 405. $200.00. ISBN 978-90-04-17109-1. The Vita Apollonii (VA), Philostratus' lengthy work—whether it is correct to call it a "life" is disputed—on the first-century philosopher cum miracle worker cum mountebank Apollonius of Tyana, has finally come into its own, and with it, Philostratus himself. Once only valued for what light it shed on the historical Jesus and the New Testament, then for "aretology" and the late antique holy man, new literary approaches and broader historical perspectives have begun to demonstrate the value of the VA in its own right. This volume, produced from a four-year research project at the University of Ghent, synopsizes and advances this development. Its fifteen essays, mostly in English and mostly from European scholars both notable and new, derive from a conference sponsored by the project at the Royal Academy in Brussels in 2006. The book is formally divided into two parts, on the literary and philological aspects of the VA and on the historical, religious, and philosophical aspects; this review, however, will discuss the essays along themes that cut across their formal organization. To begin with the fundamentals, Gerard Boter makes the case for a new critical edition of the VA —on which he has embarked—and presents a new stemma codicum. Christopher Jones discusses the evidence for the historical Apollonius and evidence from the letters attributed to him. Specific scenes from the VA are the focus of two essays. Peter Grosshardt studies the visit of Apollonius to the mound of Achilles from a literary perspective, while Jaap-Jan Flinterman focuses on Apollonius' ascension in the context of religious and archaeological evidence. A number of analytical themes echo throughout the essays in this volume. Alain Billaut takes up the fundamental question of whether the VA can be considered a biography. He argues not only that the work sits firmly within the genre but that Philostratus constructs a metabiographical discourse in explicitly commenting on his choices and motivations for what to include in his account. This issue is also pursued by Luc Van der Stockt in comparing Philostratus' work with Plutarch, and by Marc Van Uytfanghe who examines the VA as a hagiographic discourse. As with Billaut, metanarrative is also the focus of Wannes Gyselinck and Kristoffel Demoen, who discuss the complex narration of the VA in their essay. Distinguishing between the author and the narrator's voice in the work, they see a metafictional discourse in which Philostratus plays with the very concept of fiction for his most sophisticated readers. Similarly, Thomas Schirren explores metanarrative irony in the VA, and brings to the fore Philostratus' mastery in creating a polysemic text. This polysemy can be seen in a series of essays that treat the VA from specific, and refreshingly new, perspectives. Moving from narrative to reception studies, Graeme Miles examines Apollonius' portrayal as an interpreter [End Page 382] in the VA, and presents reflections on visuality and the connection between word and image that are both cutting-edge and profound. Ewen Bowie asks what can be learned from studying the quotations and allusions Philostratus uses and offers valuable tables of citations as a prolegomenon to such a study. Equally thought-provoking is Graham Anderson's examination of the VA from the prospective of folklore. John R. Morgan approaches the work from the perspective of the Emesan sun cult, drawing intriguing comparisons to Heliodorus' Aethiopica, while Erkki Koskenniemi examines Apollonius as teacher. Revisiting an old theme with fresh eyes, Danny Praet assays the VA from a philosophical perspective and reaches a conclusion that characterizes much of the work in this volume: "Philostratus did something quite unique in the Vita Apollonii. He wrote a highly sophisticated literary work that functions on different levels simultaneously: it is a remarkable piece of literary entertainment but it is also a work that should be taken very seriously both in the history of philosophy and in the history of literary technique" (320). This volume demonstrates the truth of...