Book Of Hours Research Articles

Rainer Maria Rilke's 'The Book of Hours' (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture) by Susan Ranson, Ben Hutchinson

902 Reviews biology but departs from contemporary male theorists in seeing woman as primary, rather than defined in relation toman. 'Das Weibliche', deriving as itdoes from the egg, may be less developed and differentiated than 'dasMannliche', but this is viewed as a positive; women should revel in their closeness to nature, their difference, their ability to enjoy life and think inways other than the logical. If men, like the sperm, have to strive, compete, and propel themselves, women are already fully legitimated. This biological thinking seems blithely unconcerned by the contemporary demands of the firstwomen's movement, a movement which Andreas-Salome was aware of but never joined. Rather, it shows her intellectual immersion?she was among thefirstwomen to study at university?in the (usually male, oftenmisogynist) literature and philosophy of the period, ofwhich Schiitz gives a useful overview, from Ibsen and Tolstoy toNietzsche, Mobius, and Wei ninger, the strongest influence on her own theory being Wilhelm Bolsche's Das Liebesleben inderNatur. Andreas-Salome's twenty-fiveNovellen and novels spring from her early career, roughly 1885 to 1903, preceding her friendship with Freud and her psychoana lyticalwork by some years. Schiitz provides a reading of each text, drawing out common themes such as the sexual submission of the woman, marriage as le galized prostitution, the family as a place of conflict, and incest. A final chapter draws up a typology of Andreas-Salome's women: mother-saint-madonna versus whore, working woman versus housewife, androgyny versus womanly woman, and the figure of the artist. The close readings are illuminating, ifover-descriptive at times; primary quotations are both overused and underexploited. Schiitz ismost interestingwhen she analyses Andreas-Salome's literary forms,where the tension between theory and social reality is exposed. The success of the story 'Fenitschka', for example, lies precisely in the fact that it is not, as one contemporary critic complained, a first-person narrative of female liberation; rather the eponymous protagonist, a contradictory character who develops over time, is seen through the eyes of aman who does not know what tomake of her. The tale is thus less about the essence ofwoman than about men's attempts to define and fixher. Schiitz stops short of arguing that Andreas-Salome's fiction critiques social norms, concluding merely that the theory ismore progressive than the fiction; her study also suffers from a lack of references to the effortsof Anglo-American scholars such as Biddy Martin to open up Andreas-Salome's work to reappraisal. Swansea University Brigid Haines Rainer Maria Rilke's 'The Book ofHours. Trans, by Susan Ranson. Ed. by Ben Hutchinson. (Studies inGerman Literature, Linguistics, and Culture) Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2008. xliii+240 pp. $75; ?40. ISBN 978-1 57113-380-9. For the readers and scholars of Rilkes work who have long occupied themselves with the late poetry, Rainer Maria Rilke's 'The Book ofHours' is a refreshing MLR, 105.3, 2010 903 reminder of the roots of those later texts. Ben Hutchinson makes a convincing argument that the three parts of The Book ofHours reveal Rilke's rapid early development as a poet. He helps to contextualize the three books by connecting 'The Book ofMonkish Life' to Rilke's tour of Russia with Lou Andreas-Salome in 1899, 'The Book of Pilgrimage' to his marriage and the birth of his child in 1901 inWesterwede (near the famous artists' colony inWorpswede), and 'The Book of Poverty and Death' to his experience of the urban bustle and poverty of Paris in 1903. These connections help the reader to comprehend the biographical underpinning of each of the sections; they also allow us to see the geographical settings and landscape, and the developing themes and imagery of the collection as a whole. In both his introduction and his very useful notes to each poem, Hutchinson connects themajor themes and repeated (but shifting) images of these books to Rilke's more famous pieces, including Malte Laurids Brigge, theDuineser Elegien, and the Sonette an Orpheus. This cross-referencing ofmotifs both within the Book ofHours and between this volume and the later poetry helps the reader to under stand how many of Rilke's central concerns surface early inhis work and continue...

The Institution of the Rosary. Establishing the context for a recently discovered copy after a lost panel by Geertgen tot Sint Jans in the Pommersfelden Book of Hours, Ms. 343

A book of hours illuminated around 1500 by one of the so-called Masters of the Dark Eyes (a group of miniaturists who dominated book production in the County of Holland at the time) contains a copy of The Institution of the Rosary, a lost work by Geertgen tot Sint Jans. The subjects of the various parts of the miniature and the way in which they are presented display such close similarities to a copy of the Geertgen's The Institution of the Rosarythat they must also be a copy after Geertgen's composition. Certain questions remain relating to this miniature, such as how the miniaturist knew Geertgen's composition and whether details such as St. Dominic scourging himself, the devil hurling rocks, and a dog with a burning torch were derived from Geertgen's original panel or must be seen as the miniaturist's inventions, but it is obvious that the person who commissioned the book of hours was a great devotee of the rosary and wished to associate a miniature with the prayer.

The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry (review)

TIMOTHY B. HUSBAND, The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008. Distributed by Yale University Press, New Haven and London. Pp. xii, 376. isbn: 978-1-58839-294-7 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art); 978-0-300-13671-5 (Yale University Press). $65. Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name-recently on display at the J. Paul Getty Museum and opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in September 2009-The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry provides an in-depth look at the manuscript's stunning illuminations. Curator in the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, Timothy B. Husband notes that he has advantages that earlier scholars lacked: unlimited access to the manuscript and the use of binocular microscopy. He is thus uniquely suited to offer insights into the Limbourgs' extraordinary creation. After establishing the importance of the Belles Heures in the Limbourgs' artistic evolution, Husband introduces the work. He explains the function and the usual contents of a Book of Hours and reveals what sets the Belles Heures apart: its unusually large number of illuminations-172-and seven 'picture book' insertions. In the next two sections, Husband furnishes biographical information for Jean de France and the Limbourg brothers. Husband discusses in particular Jean as a patron, paying special attention to Jean's collection of manuscripts. While each brother's contributions to their projects remain unidentified, their lives are less mysterious: Husband presents their family history and then their commissions. After the death of Philip the Bold, the brothers found a new patron in Philip's brother, Jean, who charged the siblings with adding some illuminations to the Tres Belles Heures de Notre-Dame. Husband surmises that Jean wished to test the brothers' skills and, pleased with the results, commissioned the Belles Heures. Two charts-one summarizing texts and miniatures by quire and folio and the other showing collation-outline the manuscript's structure, after which Husband considers the organization and decoration of pages, focusing on the contributions skilled workers made to the Belles Heures: the vellum, rulings, script and rubrics, textual decoration, and borders. Husband next analyzes the sequence of production, pointing to signs of the work's structural evolution over its three- to four-year period of completion. Fittingly, the gorgeous illuminations, reproduced in color and at their actual size, make up the bulk of Husband's book, with nearly 200 pages devoted to the images. Husband adopts the same general format for each component of the manuscript: he provides background information and situates the text in the tradition of Books of Hours. Next, proceeding by quire and folio, he describes each miniature and provides commentary, transcribes the text associated with the image, and gives an English translation. …

Rainer Maria Rilke: The Book of Hours. Translated by Christine McNeill and Patricia McCarthy. Pp. 127. Mayfield: Agenda Editions, 2007. Pb. £8.99. Rainer Maria Rilke's The Book of Hours: A New Translation with Commentary. Translated by Susan Ranson. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Ben Hutchinson. Pp. xliii + 240. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008. Hb. $75.

<i>Rainer Maria Rilke: The Book of Hours</i>. Translated by Christine McNeill and Patricia McCarthy. Pp. 127. Mayfield: Agenda Editions, 2007. Pb. £8.99. <i>Rainer Maria Rilke's The Book of Hours: A New Translation with Commentary</i>. Translated by Susan Ranson. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Ben Hutchinson. Pp. xliii + 240. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008. Hb. $75.

"For the Use of Women": Women and Books of Hours

"For the Use of Women": Women and Books of Hours

A Little Book of Hours

A Little Book of Hours

Spectroscopic Investigations of Bourdichon Miniatures: Masterpieces of Light and Color

Metallic bismuth, pyrite (FeS2), and specular hematite (Fe2O3) were found to have been used extensively on two miniatures taken from the Book of Hours of Louis XII by Jean Bourdichon, painter at the Royal Court of France between the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th centuries. These unusual materials were identified, together with thirteen other more traditional pigments and dyes, by Raman microscopy and X-ray fluorescence. Pyrite was found in many areas, suggesting that it may have been deliberately added as a pigment. The luminary quality of both miniatures was enhanced by the extensive use of shell gold throughout, but other less common materials such as specular hematite and mosaic gold were also utilized. Metallic bismuth was used, alone or in admixture with other pigments, to create a soft gray color. Its identification as a paint material was complemented by the study of the optical and visual properties of standard samples of metallic bismuth and several bismuth compounds. Evidence for the use of a bismuth pencil was also found.

The Printed Relations of a Manuscript Book of Hours

The Printed Relations of a Manuscript Book of Hours

The history of gardens in painting

An original, splendidly illustrated history of gardens as seen through the eyes of painters by the highly acclaimed author of Landscape Painting: A History. The creation of gardens was among the first achievements of early civilizations, and garden design was already highly developed in antiquity. Pictures of gardens are a reflection of the social, historical, and aesthetic context in which gardens were conceived. The focus of this captivating book is not the gardens themselves or the different concepts of the garden, but rather the representation of gardens in paintings. The author examines why artists paint gardens by covering the varied and lively 2,000-year history of the garden picture using 180 garden masterpieces as examples. The text begins with a look at ancient Rome, when paintings of gardens, as found in villas in Pompeii, were already valued as works of art. The wide-ranging coverage also includes pictures of charming medieval gardens in books of hours; Botticelli's masterwork La Primavera, set in a grove of orange trees; views of well-known historic gardens, such as those at Versailles; painter's gardens, as for example, Monet's Giverny; and modern gardens depicted by Frida Kahlo, Andy Warhol, and David Hockney, among others. For collectors of art history books and garden books, this lovely volume should appeal to a broad audience.

Investigation of the painting materials and techniques of the late‐15th century manuscript illuminator Jean Bourdichon

AbstractJean Bourdichon (1457–1521) was an important French painter and manuscript illuminator of the late 15th century. To examine the evolution of Bourdichon's palette and technique over the course of his career, eight illustrations from three manuscripts (of the form known as a book of hours) dating from the early 1480s to 1515 were studied using Raman microspectroscopy in conjunction with X‐ray fluorescence spectroscopy. Results reveal that Bourdichon routinely used complex pigment mixtures, employing over 12 pigments and colorants to achieve a variety of hues and subtle tonal effects. Moreover, Bourdichon's palette remained remarkably consistent throughout his career, with only subtle changes in his use of pigments. The pigments identified in Bourdichon's works in this study are typical of those found in 15th century manuscript illumination and include: vermilion, red lead, lead‐tin yellow (type I), iron earths, malachite, copper sulfate, ultramarine, azurite, lead white and carbon‐based black along with metallic gold and silver. Additionally, previously unknown as a manuscript pigment, bismuth black (granular elemental bismuth) was found in all of Bourdichon's works in this study. The discovery of bismuth black in Bourdichon's manuscript illuminations from a book of hours dating to the early 1480s may represent one of the earliest documented uses of this material as an artist's pigment. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.

Les peintures murales de l’église de Gimel. Éléments d’analyse

An analysis of the wall paintings in the church at Gimel, by Claudine Delcroix-Landry Several paintings in the chevet of the church of Saint-Pardoux at Gimel-les-Cascades (Corrèze) had been hidden since the eighteenth century by a retable and have recently been made visible. The church, the seat of an important deanery, was part of the diocese of Limoges before being attached to that of Tulle in 1822. The stratigraphy of this painted decoration is highly complex. The restoration undertaken in 2006-2007 benefitted the best preserved paintings, a Saint Anthony and a Trinity on the left of the bay, an Annunciation and a military saint on the right. The Saint Anthony, recognizable by the traditional attributes, is a devotional image comparable to so many others from the end of the Middle Ages ; the Trinity is a Trône de Grâce which may date from the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century. As for the Annunciation, it follows a model that circulated widely in Parisian books of hours at the end of the fifteenth century.

Le Ore della croce nelle liriche inglesi tardomedievali

Under the heading of the Cross the Index of Middle English Verse gathers a group of lyrics related to a devotion, particularly successful in the late Middle Ages, which connects one or more episodes of the passion narrative with the seven canonical hours of the Church office. The devotion was formalized in a Latin hymn, Patris sapientia, veritas divina, composed in the first quarter of the 14 th century, in which the events occurring in the last day of Jesus' life were encapsulated in seven quatrains, followed by a final stanza in the form of a prayer. The hymn became immensely popular, especially for being included in a widely circulated Book of Hours known in England as Prymer. The article analyses all the Middle English poems devoted to the Hours of the Cross, the majority of them being some form of of the Latin hymn. The extraordinary variety of responses to the original text, besides providing further evidence of what medieval translation was meant to be, illustrates an important aspect of medieval poetry, especially in the religious field: that more often than not the literary creation is in fact an art of variation within a well established tradition.

&lt;i&gt;Documentation: A History and Critique of Attributions, Commentary, Glosses, Marginalia, Notes, Bibliographies, Works-Cited Lists, and Citation Indexing and Analysis&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: Documentation: A History and Critique of Attributions, Commentary, Glosses, Marginalia, Notes, Bibliographies, Works-Cited Lists, and Citation Indexing and Analysis Emily Drabinski Documentation: A History and Critique of Attributions, Commentary, Glosses, Marginalia, Notes, Bibliographies, Works-Cited Lists, and Citation Indexing and Analysis. By Robert Hauptman. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2008. 240 pp. $35.00 (paper). ISBN 978-0-7864-3333-9. It has been said that if you open any serious knitter's closet, a dozen unfinished sweaters will come tumbling out. Somehow, it's the edges and seams that are the hardest to complete. Documentation—footnotes and endnotes, maps and graphs, works-cited lists, and so on—is the scholar's sleeves and collars, tidied up largely at the behest of editors and their incessant deadlines. Robert Hauptman seeks to shift the ancillary and the marginal from the closets to the center of book history in this lively scholarly monograph. Hauptman begins by making his case for giving documentation our attention. He opens his text with a brief discussion of why we cite, locating the reasons for documentation in six admittedly "sometimes mutually exclusive purposes," including "acknowledgement, attribution, tracing, validation, protection against accusations of misconduct, and tangential substantive commentary" (7). He [End Page 501] grounds the process of documentation in contexts of both history and meaning. Hauptman briefly traces documentation's history, beginning with the call to hail one's predecessors in the oral tradition and taking its story up to the increasingly specialized citation requirements of contemporary scholarly publishing that plague particularly the sciences. With these overviews in hand Hauptman examines documentation thematically, exploring eight aspects, including commentary and its role in Talmudic scholarship and medieval texts, the purpose of marginal notes (both published and those made by readers in their own copies of texts), the place of maps and illustrations in texts, and the histories of citation systems. The book is amply illustrated, and the pages reproduced from the Book of Hours and Diderot's Encyclopedia beg for an edition in color and on fine paper, the better to display documentation systems that sometimes reach the level of art. Hauptman covers a lot of territory here, displaying a remarkable breadth of knowledge both on the subject of citation (he marshals a broader range of documentation scholars than the reader would have thought exists) and on the history of literature in general. In this relatively brief volume Hauptman evokes Eliot, Coleridge, and Joyce; David Foster Wallace and Jacques Derrida; Isaac Newton and the benzene ring of Friedrich August Kekulé. Hauptman's engaging embellished history of documentation is nevertheless forged around a solid scholarly account. He often becomes emotionally engaged in his subject, for example, bemoaning the demise of the footnote at the hands of cost-cutting publishing houses and calling the advent of Web-based bibliographies a "barbarism" (125). Simply because documentation often appears neutral doesn't mean Hauptman has to be. Hauptman saves the bulk of his criticism for postmodern experiments with documentation. He pays special attention to Jacques Derrida's Glas, a book that deliberately plays with font styles and text placements in order to call into question the structure of printed texts themselves. Calling this "a type of madness" that "succeeds admirably, to the point of total confusion" (101), Hauptman resists the postmodern tendency to shift and play with structure. Ultimately, Hauptman's scholarly affections are reserved not simply for the structures of documentation themselves but for the order they impose. While the contemporary reader might balk at his wholesale dismissal of postmodernism and other trends, Hauptman succeeds in opening a conversation that, prior to Documentation, would likely not have taken place at all. [End Page 502] Emily Drabinski Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus Copyright © 2009 University of Texas Press

:Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers 1240-1570

In this richly illustrated book, religious historian Eamon Duffy discusses the Book of Hours, unquestionably the most intimate and most widely used book of the later Middle Ages. He examines surviving copies of the personal prayer books which were used for private, domestic devotions, and in which people commonly left traces of their lives. Manuscript prayers, biographical jottings, affectionate messages, autographs, and pious paste-ins often crowd the margins, flyleaves, and blank spaces of such books. From these sometimes clumsy jottings, viewed by generations of librarians and art historians as blemishes at best, vandalism at worst, Duffy teases out precious clues to the private thoughts and public contexts of their owners, and insights into the times in which they lived and prayed. His analysis has a special relevance for the history of women, since women feature very prominently among the identifiable owners and users of the medieval Book of Hours. Books of Hours range from lavish illuminated manuscripts worth a king's ransom to mass-produced and sparsely illustrated volumes costing a few shillings or pence. Some include customized prayers and pictures requested by the purchaser, and others, handed down from one family member to another, bear the often poignant traces of a family's history over several generations. Duffy places these volumes in the context of religious and social change, above all the Reformation, discusses their significance to Catholics and Protestants, and describes the controversy they inspired under successive Tudor regimes. He looks closely at several special volumes, including the cherished Book of Hours that Sir Thomas More kept with him in the Tower of London as he awaited execution.

:On the Purification of Women: Churching in Northern France, 1100–1500.(The New Middle Ages.)

Paula M. Rieder's learned, careful book examining the ritual reincorporation of postpartum mothers into the parishes of medieval France offers a useful corrective to the broad generalizations about churching, a topic that has become visible only recently. Churching was important in establishing and maintaining boundaries between laity and ecclesiastical authorities, in defining appropriate conduct in marriage and motherhood, and in negotiating the multiple meanings of both the private and the corporate female body. It was the very pervasiveness of churching in the lives of premodern women, its “ordinariness” (p. 171) as Rieder plausibly argues, that probably made it so rarely commented on by medieval sources. It is a tribute to the author's remarkably exhaustive search of ecclesiastical court records, liturgies, sermons, books of hours, and other primary manuscript sources (cf. p. 214, n. 22: “I found only four descriptions of lying-in in over 1,400 letters of remission”) that in this book significant chronological and regional differences in the uses of churching become clear for the first time.

Rainer Maria Rilke's The book of hours: a new translation with commentary

Rainer Maria Rilke is arguably the most important modern German-language poet. His New Poems, Duino Elegies, and Sonnets to Orpheus are pillars of 20th-century poetry. Yet his earlier verse is less known. Book of Hours, written in three bursts between 1899 and 1903, is Rilke's most formative work, covering a crucial period in his rapid ascent from fin-de-siecle epigone to distinctive modern voice. The poems document Rilke's tour of Russia with Lou Andreas-Salome, his hasty marriage and fathering of a child in Worpswede, and his turn toward the urban modernity of Paris.He assumes the persona of an artist-monk undertaking the Romantics' journey into the self, speaking to God as part transcendent deity, part needy neighbor. The poems can be read simply for their luminous lyricism, captured in Susan Ranson's superb new translation, which reproduces the music of the original German with impressive fluidity. An in-depth introduction explains the context of the work and elucidates its major themes, while the poem-by-poem commentary is helpful to the student and the general reader. A translator's note treating the technical problems of rhythm, meter, and rhyme that the translator of Rilke faces completes the volume. Susan Ranson has published her own poems as well as translations of Rilke and of the Minnesanger. Ben Hutchinson is Lecturer in German at the University of Kent in Canterbury.

Kathryn A. Smith, Art, Identity, and Devotion in Fourteenth‐Century England: Three Women and Their Books of Hours. The British Library Studies in Medieval Culture. London: British Library, 2003. xx+364 pp. $75.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewKathryn A. Smith, Art, Identity, and Devotion in Fourteenth‐Century England: Three Women and Their Books of Hours. The British Library Studies in Medieval Culture. London: British Library, 2003. xx+364 pp. $75.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).Joan A. Holladay, Joan A. HolladayUniversity of Texas at Austin. Search for more articles by this author , University of Texas at Austin.PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 88, Number 2April 2008 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/587585 Views: 58Total views on this site © 2008 by The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Entrances and Exits: Performing the Psalms in Goscelin's "Liber confortatorius"

In about 1080 the young English nun Eva decided to step up her religious com mitment and become a recluse. Apparently without discussing her move with any one, she secretly left her convent, the prestigious royal abbey of Wilton, and crossed to Angers, where she joined what appears to have been an established community of anchoresses attached to a church there. Her former teacher and mentor, the monk, hagiographer, and musician Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, learned of her departure after some delay. His Liber confortatorius, datable to about 1082/ 83, is by far the most personal and most original text in his considerable oeuvre, expressing deep personal grief about Eva's departure.1 It is a book of spiritual advice, in the tradition of Jerome and Ambrose, or more recent masters like John of Fecamp and Anselm, and anticipating later and more familiar anchoritic texts like Aelred of Rievaulx's De institutione inclusarum and the Ancrene Wisse. It is an anthology of texts and excerpts that Goscelin and Eva both valued. It is a guide to meditation. It is also a personal letter, a lament, a consolation, and self consolation. One of the exciting things about the Liber confortatorius, apart from its per sonal engagement and its sometimes disconcerting glimpses of more than just spiritual attachment, is precisely its early date. Goscelin tends to anticipate ideas and practices that are familiar to us from the later Middle Ages, and it is often surprising to find them in the 1080s. And, as is often the case with letters of spiritual counsel, one has the impression of watching someone's private theology unfold-not so much original thought as a personal mix of reflections and de votions. Some religious practices that later in the Middle Ages gelled into standard usage or hardened into prescriptive rules are offered as personal habits, an exchange of ideas, suggestions, shoptalk along the lines of I do it like or here is something you might want to try. For instance, the Little Office of the Virgin, not exactly referred to in this text but certainly implied, had evidently been around in personal, voluntary, or local usage some two centuries before it became near-universal monastic practice in the twelfth century and a centerpiece of lay devotion with the development of the book of hours.2 Goscelin's comments on

Karaite Joseph Ezra Dubitskii and King John III Sobieski: on Jewish physicians, Christianity, and a fifteenth‐century illuminated manuscript from Windsor Castle

An early fifteenth‐century illuminated manuscript, known also as the Sobieski Book of Hours, is undoubtedly one of the most valuable medieval manuscripts from those currently kept in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. Produced in the workshop of the Master of the Duke of Bedford in Paris between 1420 and 1425, this beautiful manuscript represents a collection of prayers for private devotional use. Somewhat surprisingly, the only exact chronological reference which reflects travels of this unique Christian manuscript is a lengthy Hebrew inscription left on one of its folios in 1683, the time when this manuscript was in the possession of the Polish King John (Jan) III Sobieski. A logical question – why a Jew was allowed to leave a message on a most precious Christian manuscript – has been troubling the minds of scholars in the last few decades. This article is an attempt to solve the mystery of this Hebrew inscription and, furthermore, cast a light on the relations between Polish kings and their Jewish physicians. Special attention is dedicated to the role of Karaite (i.e. non‐Talmudic) physicians and their attitude to Christianity in seventeenth‐century Poland. The article contributes to our understanding of the position of the Jewish community in early modern Polish‐Lithuanian Commonwealth and development of Jewish‐Christian dialogue in Eastern Europe in general.

“The Book of Hours ” And “ The Ways They Silence Women ”

“The Book of Hours ” And “ The Ways They Silence Women ” Angela Veronica Wong (bio) The Book of Hours January It begins, suspended bustles and thighs that don’t touch spread like a mass grave uncovered. February Is this you hovering? Face, curving letters and exclamations, mouth-tough and glistening a threat. [End Page 261] March Your body— white shark. April squeeze together bleed into and out of pretense discontinue promise May Moss weather and yellow identity. June Crablike I creak gold and pearl. July i itch you peel my skin off like a tarp [End Page 262] August memory suicide September my mythology punishes. October In my dream, I moved your hand onto my belt. You parted my lips. We were not far apart then. You did not speak You were welcome intrusion You were list less lost last lust I forget. November cold like jade I self-heal expand like a clot I am chemical I am blood in the toilet [End Page 263] cliffs shrinking wet cornhusk three colors haunting each other hunted unsettled discard I am purposeful bride December like sleep, falls lightly. The Ways They Silence Women the ways they silence women: roll of paper or piece of wood stuffed these are days when living as a woman is acknowledging you are a rape waiting to happen no matter how many lemons you scrub on your skin to stop smelling of yourself Angela Veronica Wong Angela Vernica Wong recently named a kitten Galliano and even more recently painted her bathroom hot pink. She lives and dances in New York City. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Womb, and Court Green. Acknowledgment The calendar poems are a series of short poems under the title “The Book of Hours.” “June” was previously published in Foursquare (edited and published by Jessica Smith, 2007; reprinted by permission of the author). [End Page 264] Copyright © 2008 Kathryn Abrams & Irene Kacandes