Core Text Research Articles

Appraising Digital Texts: The Role of Images in Nineteenth-Century Electronic Editions

This essay addresses the contested role of images in digital versions of nineteenth-century scholarly editions and archives. Unlike early generation projects that offered visual information as contextual material or projects that regarded digital images as a reliable, affordable reproduction of the original, recent electronic editions and archives address the status of the core text existing in varying media, and these projects regard high-resolution digital images as constructions. While the latest projects assume that all reproductions are interpretations and hence can never be completely reliable or neutral, the pro-image approach relies on a different solution to the problem of reliability as a whole, which corresponds to a distinct political model of knowledge construction: more eyes as preferable to higher abstraction. By virtue of the triumph of editorial transparency, image-based digital editions and archives have set themselves apart from paper-based critical editions, reasoning that digital reproduction of facsimile material is better than any transcription produced by a few isolated authorities who have rare exclusive access to the originals. Print editions remain a powerful analytical tool, but emerging practices in digital scholarly editing raise the level of analytical powers of scholarly editions, corresponding better to the non-hierarchical nature of the literary text that many literary scholars and students cherish.

In Pentateuchum Commentarii on the Red Sea Crossing: Content, Composition, and Coherence

This article presents a case study analyzing the composition and content of the anonymous seventh- to eighth-century In Pentateuchum commentarii, specifically the β recension. This recension contains interpolated passages mostly not attributable to any identified sources. These are less polished than the core text shared by all the recensions, which draws heavily on Isidore and Origen-Rufinus. The interpolations in the texts analyzed here - commenting on Exodus 14 - constitute nonetheless a coherent section of the commentary that demonstrates knowledge of patristic sources and presents a range of interpretations complementary to the core text. I identify several connections between this recension and certain patristic and early medieval sources that help to locate it within the scholarly culture of the early medieval Latin West. These sources include the ps. Hilarian Tractatus in septem epistolas canonicas and the Frigulus Commentary on Matthew, reused in the anonymous Liber questionum in Euangeliis, as well as the Quaestiones in Heptateuchum of Augustine.

Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic by Peter C. Mancall

Reviewed by: Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic by Peter C. Mancall Shepard Krech III Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic. By Peter C. Mancall. Early Modern Americas. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. xvi, 197. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-4966-8.) In recent years an active research topic on the early modern era has been the intersection of human beings and the natural world (or "nature"). From all sides have come significant works investigating the science of describing natural history and the invention of exoticism and the endemic or the indigenous. Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic explores the natural world as conceived in the sixteenth-century Atlantic basin. With footings in both history and anthropology, Peter C. Mancall is well positioned to plumb the topic—and the result, which started as the Mellon Distinguished Lectures in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, proves the adage that good things can and at times do come in small packages. The author regards this work as an "extended essay" (p. x). With a core text of 137 pages, generous spacing and margins, and engaging illustrations (including twelve color plates), it delights as it enlightens at every turn. Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic consists of three chapters, a postscript, and a note on sources. Mancall states that he has drawn on images, printed texts, folklore, and oral history for his analysis. In fact, the first two are clearly of paramount importance, and images are both central to and a great strength of this work. In the first chapter, Mancall pushes the frontiers of the other-than-natural world, both to establish the boundaries of the natural world and to address how people at the time knew what they knew. His answers pertain principally to the Europeans, as we see (and read about) both monstra marina on oceanic maps and curious beings, human or not (such as bipedal creatures with faces on their chests), on continental maps. Mancall wonders if the Europeans really believed in such boundary-bursting creatures, but he also notes that in 1500 the wondrous categories of indigenous people were not that different. But as the sixteenth century unfolded, the wonders in European cultural conceptions yielded to newer methodologies of description and explanation embedded increasingly in an encyclopedic and, in citations, authoritative science. The second chapter explores what Mancall calls a "new ecology," drawing extensively on the extraordinary visual evidence in maps linked to Nicolas [End Page 412] Vallard of Dieppe and António de Holanda—including the Atlas Miller (1519) and in the Histoire Naturelle des Indes (circa 1590s). The maps, for example, contrast fully clothed, city-dwelling Europeans with naked, forest-dwelling native people of the New World and Africa. They reflect strong interests in commodification and trade. They depict not just strange people, some feathered in their wear (and others cannibals—a common trope), but also novel mammals and birds. The maps and other materials also contrast the deforested lands and cities of Europe with the forested lands and architecturally simpler living spaces of Africa and the Western Hemisphere. That change was coming to the latter, however, is reflected in images of commodification and of the cutting of valuable trees in the New World; a portent, ominous or not, of the future as well as a symbol of the broader Columbian exchange of plants with dietary or medicinal value and other commodities. Chapter 3, "The Landscape of History," is a case study of the manipulation by the English of an imagery of landscape and people originally conceived with what we would now call ethnographic intent, in order that it might be reconciled with their understanding of their claim on Indian lands as legitimate. Mancall draws on depictions of Algonquians on the Carolina coast—John White's watercolors, Thomas Harriot's text, Richard Hakluyt's editions, and Theodor de Bry's engravings—to discuss processes of selection and alteration from painting to engraving that benefited the promoters in England and not the Native people in Carolina. Again, analysis of the visual materials deeply informs the discussion. The postscript, "The Theater of Insects," draws its title...

We Refugees

After the World War I, every more or less considerable political crisis causes a wave of refugees. And 76 years have passed since Arendt’s essay “We refugees” was published for the first time by a small Jewish publisher in New York. By today, this text is among the core texts of contemporary political philosophy and civic journalism. However, the waves of the refugees go on without end, while Arendt’s harsh truth does not lose its importance. She argues that patriotism is probably the only shelter for those who has lost everything. Today, when we witness new experiences of the refugees, and refuge from the destroyed motherland, this text is to remind us why we should care about those who lost everything for no good reason.

Transculturality and the German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism by Chunjie Zhang

Reviewed by: Transculturality and the German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism by Chunjie Zhang Christine Winter Transculturality and the German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism. By Chunjie Zhang. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017. Pp. 252. Cloth $99.95. ISBN 978-0810134782. Paper $34.95. ISBN 978-0810134775. This mature and well-researched book moves from the Pacific to Germany and traces encounters, meetings, and engagement of Germans and Pacific Islanders by analyzing the resulting entangled texts: travel writing, stage plays, and philosophical works. It asks how transculturality shaped discourses, culture, and thought in an evolving Germany. Chunjie Zhang thoroughly contextualizes and theorizes her approach. She analyzes not the making of German imperialism and its impact on a colonized world, but rather the impact of the Pacific on German culture, German nation building, and German ideas about itself and a wider world. She is, as the introduction states, "reading from the other side" (3). Reading this book from the perspective of the Global South is an intellectual delight. It resonates with innovative research on the distinctiveness and contribution of the South to the creation of knowledge, theories about human diversity, and ideas about community and nation building. Since the publication of sociologist Raewyn Connell's Southern Theory (2007) that argued for the appreciation of distinct Southern voices, namely those of the dispossessed non-Europeans, the debate has moved on to include the colonizers. Warwick Anderson, a scholar of race and ethnicity, has argued that the South draws theorists and scientists into engagements and thought that are different from the North, and are characterized by more fluid boundaries and fewer hierarchical constructions of human difference and diversity. Nicholas Thomas has theorized colonialism's culture and the entanglement of objects, and he argues that encounters remain part of dislocated objects though their appreciation changes in their move from the South to the metropol museums of the North and the Southern Settler nations (Entangled Objects, 1991; Colonialism's Culture, 1994). Chunjie Zhang's book extends this analysis to literature understood in a wide sense, and reappraises some core texts of German culture in a new and intellectually fascinating light. Chunjie Zhang problematizes claims that nation states and nationalism engaged with, or rather generated, imperial desires and colonial expansion. She turns this [End Page 145] analysis on its head through her focus on German cultures and discourses. Colonial voyages and the observations they generated informed German culture throughout the long process of nation building. The German case is therefore a case study Zhang employs to reexamine the connections of colonialism and the nation. Her analysis focuses on the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, a "period of tremendous transformation in German and European conceptions of identity and difference, of self and others" (3–4). The volume deals in six chapters with three different genres that, according to the author, represent three prominent cultural practices of this period with regard to cultural and geographic difference and diversity: observing and reporting; entertaining and educating; and philosophizing and shaping intellectual and public discourse. The first two chapters deal with the two great voyage accounts written by travelers of German heritage. George Foster, naturalist, Enlightenment scholar, and journalist, traveled with his father to the South Pacific on Captain James Cook's second voyage (1772–1775), and published his accounts in English and German. Adalbert von Chamisso, poet and botanist, published on his voyage around the world, undertaken with a Russian expedition aboard the Rurik (1815–1818). Zhang opts to focus on these voyages due to their impact on German culture and their occurrence before the onset of European imperialism, although European interests and staging ports were already encroaching on the South Pacific. More importantly, both Foster and Chamisso were border crossers within Europe before and after their respective voyages. Their life-long experiences with otherness and willingness to engage make them ideal case studies for Zhang's analysis. Chapters 3 and 4 engage with the work of two writers who drew upon Foster's travel writings in imaginative ways, namely Joachim Heinrich Campe's adaptation of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe in Robinson der Jüngere (1779–1780), and some of the plays and...

Epilogue

OHQ vol. 120, no. 4 606 Epilogue by Eliza E. Canty-Jones THANK YOU for reading this special issue of the Oregon Historical Quarterly . The work of preparing this issue for publication has been both professionally satisfying and emotionally wrenching. Since we began this project in summer 2017, the news has been filled with reports of White supremacist organizing and violence. White supremacists have repeatedly and proudly marched in Portland, Oregon. Men deploying White supremacist rhetoric have attacked Muslims praying in Christchurch, New Zealand, Jewish people gathering in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and families perceived to be Mexican shopping in El Paso, Texas. These events are tied to both the history we have been exploring through this special issue and to one another. After the massacre in El Paso, historian of radical right movements Kathleen Belew wrote: The white power movement imagines race war, incited by mass violence among other strategies. The core texts of this movement . . . provide a road map to how such violence could succeed. To call them manuals is too simplistic: They provide the collective ideas and vision by which a fringe movement can attempt a violent confrontation that could lead to a race war.* As we undertook the labor of creating this investigation of White supremacy and resistance in Oregon history, it was impossible to ignore the contemporary violence that is linked to the legacy of that history. Our sincere hope, as Carmen Thompson wrote in the introduction, is that the work we have produced offers readers a “freshness of thought” that can itself be a tool for resisting White supremacy. While we believe this issue provides a substantial framework for understanding the history of White supremacy and resistance in Oregon, we know it is by no means comprehensive. The work of perceiving the structures of White supremacy, and the attendant expectations of Whiteness, is the work of a lifetime. For 120 years, the Oregon Historical Society has published this journal every three months. We expect that investigations of White supremacy will continue to fill its pages for years to come. * Kathleen Belew, “The Right Way to Understand White Nationalist Terrorism,” New York Times, August 4, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/04/opinion/el-paso-terrorism.html (accessed November 26, 2019) ...

Steward of God's Mysteries: Paul and Early Church Tradition by Jerry L. Sumney

Reviewed by: Steward of God's Mysteries: Paul and Early Church Tradition by Jerry L. Sumney Mary T. Brien jerry l. sumney, Steward of God's Mysteries: Paul and Early Church Tradition ( Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017). Pp. xiv + 209. Paper $28. Only a Pauline scholar of Sumney's caliber and experience could comprehensively address the topic of Paul's relationship with early church tradition in a manner that is at once novel, wide-ranging, and convincing. This he does primarily by countering the theories of three authors who accuse Paul of inventing or transforming Christianity. In substance, this book is a refutation by S. of the arguments presented in Hyam Maccoby's Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), Barrie Wilson's How Jesus Became a Christian (New York: St Martin's, 2008), and James D. Tabor's Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012). But it is much more. It is a unique study of relevant selections from Paul's letters that demonstrate that Paul had links to a variety of preexisting liturgical and doctrinal sources. It is also a solid refutation of the many assertions made over centuries that Paul is "Founder of Christianity." This seven-chapter volume opens with a foreword by Patrick Gray, surveying the centuries-old story of Paul's enemies, from the Ebionites of the second century to the scholars of modern times, exemplified chiefly by Maccoby, Wilson, and Tabor, but not confined to them. The book's core chapters deal in succession with Paul's place in the early church, the meaning of the death of Jesus, the identity of Jesus, understandings of salvation, the coming of the Lord, and the Lord's Supper. The final chapter serves as a review of the explorations made, showing how Paul draws on preformed traditions in a number of places in his letters, respecting these traditions and elaborating a teaching based on them. In dealing with his chosen topic, S. departs from a commonly used methodology. Instead of comparing the teachings of Jesus, as found in the Gospels, with the teachings of Paul, as found in his letters, S. chooses to explore the relationship between the teachings of the earliest church and Paul's thought. He rejects some current methodological approaches as problematic because of uncertainty regarding what the evangelists represent as "the emphases of the historical Jesus" (p. 14). Rather than comparing a primary source (Paul's letters) with a secondary source (the Gospels), S. chooses a more fruitful method, designed to provide textual evidence on the long-standing question, Is Paul is the inventor of teachings about Jesus or does he adopt "the teachings about Jesus that were already current in the church?" (p. 15). S. employs fourteen criteria in the determination of a positive answer to the latter possibility. The criteria chosen represent a synthesis of those established by Vernon H. Neufeld, The Earliest Christian Confessions (NTTS 5; Leiden: Brill, 1963); E. Earle Ellis, "Pre-formed Traditions and Their Implications for Pauline Christology," in Christology, Controversy and Community: New Testament Essays in honour of David R. Catchpole (ed. David G. Horrell and Christopher M. Tuckett; NovTSup 99; Leiden: Brill, 2000) 303-20; Marcus Barth, "Traditions in Ephesians," NTS 30 (1984) 3-25; and Claus Bussman, Themen der paulinischen Missionspredigt auf dem Hintergrund der spätjüdischhellenistichen Missionsliteratur (Europäische Hochschulschriften, Series 23.3; Bern: Herbert Lang, 1971). Chapters 2–6 contain the core of the study. Each chapter offers a detailed analysis of core texts from the undisputed letters of Paul, demonstrating the links between these texts and preexisting traditions—creedal, confessional, liturgical, hymnic, and other. For example, [End Page 738] in dealing with soteriology in chap. 4, S. invokes Rom 3:24-26; 7:4; 8:11; 1 Thess 1:9b-10; 4:14; Gal 2:16, 20; 3:27-28; and 1 Cor 6:11, also offering other possible texts for consideration. Each chapter ends with a conclusion and summary of positions reached. The evidence is clear and compelling that Paul relies on earlier and varied church traditions as a basis for instructions to his churches. In addressing the more...

Interrogating Western Modernity: Postcolonial Reflections on Occidental Claims and Action

This paper deals with the way in which European modernity, and the West more generally, are reflected upon in the field of post- and decolonial theories, which generally question those representations of the European/Western tradition of thought and politics that only focus on their positive aspects, but differ greatly with regard to the way in which they frame and formulate their critique of this tradition. I discuss three major positions in this field. They are characterized by the rejection of Western modernity (Walter Mignolo), by a deconstruction of core text and principles of the European Enlightenment (Gayatri Spivak), and by attempts at a renewal and hence a radicalization of some of its core normative claims, particularly humanism (Achille Mbembe).

Dirty Harry’s America: Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry, and the Conservative Backlash by Joe Street (review)

Reviewed by: Dirty Harry’s America: Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry, and the Conservative Backlash by Joe Street Paul Cohen and Deborah Allison Dirty Harry’s America: Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry, and the Conservative Backlash Joe Street University Press of Florida, 2016. 280 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8130-6167-2 (hbk) Countless words have already been expended on Dirty Harry (dir. Don Siegel, 1971) and its four film sequels, ranging from popular criticism to scholarly appraisals of their ideological aspects, including their seemingly simple yet often muddled representation of issues related to law and order; racial, sexual and economic politics; and ideas of national identity. Indeed, such is the level of interest generated by the franchise, it seems astonishing that it has taken a full forty-five years from Dirty Harry’s release for a sustained book-length study to pull together the key issues and debates the films have sparked. Happily, Street’s work proves worth the wait. Thorough, clearly structured, and incisive, it functions as a valuable case study of how popular cinema both reflected and fuelled widespread political and cultural anxieties at a particular historical moment. At the same time, it encourages readers to reflect on both the ongoing reciprocity between culture and politics, and the contemporary challenges of America’s continued struggles to address the societal discontents that first spawned the Harry Callahan persona and which have ensured he remains a simultaneously popular and controversial figure. Beginning with an introductory essay in which he lays out “why Dirty Harry matters,” Street proceeds to explore the origins, core texts, and paratexts of the franchise, and its cultural and political resonance, in six sharply focused chapters. The first features a relatively brief survey of the development of Clint Eastwood’s star image (which became, and remains, inextricably linked with the Harry persona) alongside issues of authorship associated with his serial collaboration with director Don Siegel. The second appraises the various cultural, political and cinematic forebears that intertwined to establish Dirty Harry’s “tone, themes, and subtexts, including its political position” (11–12), with the third centered squarely on a detailed and wide-ranging analysis of the first Dirty Harry film. In the three final chapters, Street explores less trodden ground: the four film sequels; “Callahan’s echoes in conservative political rhetoric and Eastwood’s later film career” (13); and a range of other official and unofficial Harry paratexts, from spin-off novels and video games to graphic novels and fan fiction. Street’s general approach to the Dirty Harry franchise echoes that of his earlier book, The Culture War in the Civil Rights Movement (University Press of Florida, 2007). A British-based lecturer in American history, he shows himself to be well versed in American politics and economic policy of the second half of the twentieth century and uses this knowledge to ground his arguments about the domestic climate from which Dirty Harry and its paratexts arose. Summarizing relevant political moments and movements efficiently, and with the detached clarity of an outsider, he argues that “like Nixon, Reagan, and the [End Page 23] Republicans, the film cast a critical eye over the previous decade’s missteps and mistakes, both from a national and a local perspective” (64). Whereas national perspectives feature widely (if often more sketchily) in other critical appraisals of Dirty Harry, Street’s attention to the local proves valuable and original. For instance, he describes how the regeneration of San Francisco under mayor Joseph Alioto in the late 1960s and early 1970s contributed to the displacement and disenfranchisement of thousands of poor, single, white men (79), and offers textual evidence to suggest that Callahan’s antagonist Scorpio might be one such man. “Even as it presents Scorpio as wholly unsympathetic,” Street argues, “Dirty Harry hints at the circumstances that produced such a character, while again suggesting that the 1960s liberalism caused more problems than it solved” (80). As the title of the book suggests, and in line with Street’s stated purpose, later chapters follow through his proposal that “Callahan be appreciated as a symbol of the conservative backlash of the post-1960s period” (14). While continuing to locate his textual analysis primarily within the framework of...

The I Ching (Book of Changes): A Critical Translation of the Ancient Text by Geoffrey Redmond

Reviewed by: The I Ching (Book of Changes): A Critical Translation of the Ancient Text by Geoffrey Redmond David J. Lebovitz Geoffrey Redmond, The I Ching (Book of Changes): A Critical Translation of the Ancient Text. New York: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2017. xxix, 464 pp. US$26.95 (PB). ISBN 978-1-4725-1413-4 In the opening to his translation of the Shujing 書經, the Chinese Book of Documents canon, the great linguist and philologist Bernard Karlgren remarked that owing to its “lapidary style” and “exceedingly obscure,” archaic language, the Shujing “frequently offers passages which, from the point of view of grammar, allow of several widely different interpretations,” such that “every new translation will be nothing more than a new attempt at interpretation.”1 So much for certitude in translating the Chinese classics. And if the Shujing’s relatively concrete political oratory is difficult to decipher, the Yijing 易經 (I Ching; Book of Changes), which originated as a pastiche of divinatory oracles, is so much more difficult; while the Yijing’s core text shares the same distantly archaic language of the Shujing, there is no reason to believe its oracles ever strove to be unambiguous. At the very least, Geoffrey Redmond’s new translation of the Yijing, which seeks to excavate plain meaning from the book’s oracular phrases, augurs well for new attempts at interpretation. The translation aims to cut away the moralizing, philosophical façade erected by the commentarial tradition and to liberate Yijing translation from the blend of neo-Confucianism, Jungian psychology, and new-age spirituality that made the 1950 translation of Richard Wilhelm and Cary F. Baynes so popular in the following decades.2 The core of the Yijing consists of a set of sixty-four oracular texts which may date as early as the late Western Zhou (ca. eighth-century BCE). Each of the texts is associated with a unique hexagram figure of six lines, each line being either broken or unbroken in a binary fashion, so as to yield sixty-four permutations. The texts have several parts: (1) a name or “tag” identifying the hexagram; (2) a “judgement” that responds to the hexagram as a whole; and (3) line statement texts for each of the six individual lines of each figure. The interpretation of the texts has for at least two millennia been transmitted and read under the influence of the “ten wings,” a set of closely associated early commentaries of uncertain origin, which [End Page 215] elaborate a metaphysical and moral framework for understanding the Yijing, and have traditionally been integral to the text. The primary aim of the new translation is to read the Yijing’s core oracular texts as they may have been read sometime during the Western Zhou 周 dynasty (1048–771 BCE). The textual layer that Redmond translates is thus more appropriately called the Zhouyi 周易 (Zhou [dynasty] Changes). The translation regards this layer primarily as a pre-axial book of divination, rather than as the philosophical manual or spiritual guidebook that it became under the influence of later commentaries and interpretive practices. This historical approach is not new: dissertations by Richard Alan Kunst (1985) and Edward L. Shaughnessy (1983) are pioneering efforts to treat Western Zhou layers of the Yijing historically, and the former translates the entire core text.3 A 1996 translation by Richard Rutt, a priest and former missionary to Korea, also sought to present the early, core text of the classic.4 Redmond takes a secular and critical—yet optimistic—approach to the Yijing. He sees profound value in the book yet does not regard it as universally true,5 nor does he make any claim to explicate a timeless truth. His concern is largely historical, and he is indebted to prior studies and scholarly translations that are both historically conscious and “sinologically sound” rather than “new age” or “literary” (pp. 408– 409). Among “sinologically sound” translations, Redmond counts those of Kunst, Shaughnessy, and Rutt mentioned above (Redmond reserves a special affection for the latter). As a model of this historically conscious approach to later interpretive traditions, he includes also the work of Richard John Lynn, whose translation reads the Yijing historically through the profoundly influential...

The Invention of Judaism: Torah and Jewish Identity from Deuteronomy to Paul by John J. Collins (review)

Reviewed by: The Invention of Judaism: Torah and Jewish Identity from Deuteronomy to Paul by John J. Collins David Arthur Lambert John J. Collins. The Invention of Judaism: Torah and Jewish Identity from Deuteronomy to Paul. The Taubman Lectures in Jewish Studies 7. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. 319 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009418000545 The Invention of Judaism is really a book about the status of the Torah in ancient Judaism, and its complexities, that also considers how its varying construal impacted questions of Jewish or Judean identity. In this capacity, Collins successfully problematizes our understanding of the place of the Pentateuch as authoritative Scripture in the Second Temple period by highlighting its surprising absences. His work points to a real need for further theorizing concerning the nature and use of the Torah. As such, The Invention of Judaism represents an important advance over standard accounts of the formation of the canon. These histories have tended to focus on a canonical series of core texts, such as the prologue to Ben Sira and 2 Maccabees, to determine whether they reflect a closed canon or one that remains open. Such a procedure presumes a relatively uniform concept of authority and, invariably, a process of linear development. Instead, Collins considers the more fundamental question of how directly various groups of Judeans even related to the Torah. In the process, he succinctly reviews many key debates in the field, making characteristically judicious choices among them. Collins's evenhandedness and clarity makes the book quite useful and highly readable for students and scholars alike. "Introduction: Jews, Judeans, and the Maccabean Crisis" reviews current thinking about the nature of ioudaios as a form of identity. Collins seems to side with the view that "religion" was embedded in a wider web of ethnic identity, but that "Judaism" did not exist in an "unembedded" form. For Collins, much of the question hinges on the place assigned to the Judeans' "ancestral law," a concept that helpfully identifies how issues of practice and identity intersect. As [End Page 443] such, Antiochus IV Ephiphanes's attack on Torah observances, which provoked the Maccabean crisis, could be seen as a form of political repression, deprivation of the right to follow one's ancestral customs, rather than an implausible direct assault on religion. In "Deuteronomy and the Invention of the Torah," following several recent scholars, Collins makes the case for the Deuteronomic Code never constituting a comprehensive, prescriptive source of authoritative law, but serving instead an educational or propagandistic purpose. "Torah in the Persian Period" notes the striking absence of Torah in early restoration texts as well as in the records preserved from the Jewish community at Elephantine. That picture fits the sense of novelty around the Torah's position in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. There too there are questions about the version of the Torah in use, as well as the vagueness of references to it, but it is clear from the frequent use of the formula, kakathub, "as it is written," that there is in view some concern for actual adherence to a textual authority. Despite the clear emergence of the Pentateuch from the Persian period on, "The Persistence of Non-Mosaic Judaism" questions whether according primary importance to the Torah was basic to Judean identity in the Hellenistic period. Indeed, its acknowledgment is surprisingly absent from entire corpora of literature—the wisdom tradition prior to Ben Sira, Enochic literature, and diasporic tales such as Esther and Daniel 1–6. As noted in "Torah as Narrative and Wisdom," even so-called "Rewritten Bible" texts, so clearly dependent on the Torah, fail to relate to it explicitly as works of exegesis. Ben Sira recognizes the authority of the "Law of Moses," but associates it with a broader sense of wisdom and refrains from explicit citation; Tobit references the "Law of Moses," but only in general terms of piety, and even attributes to it laws not found there. "Torah as Law" looks at how observance of ancestral law, an important focus after the Maccabean revolt, could be a basis for a common Judaism, but also lead to a heightened scrutiny of Torah as religious law, evident in such texts...

Book Review: Affordable Course Materials: Electronic Textbooks and Open Educational Resources

The nine case studies collected in Affordable Course Materials cite research that points to the same truth students across the country face with each new academic term: the price of textbooks far outpaces the rate of inflation. According to an oft-cited report released by the Government Accountability Office in 2013, the price of the average new textbook rose 82 percent in the preceding decade—three times the rate of inflation.1 These case studies assert the claim that libraries, already both a central part of the campus community and committed to equal access to information resources, are perfectly poised to mitigate the cost of core texts. By facilitating access to course materials in innovative ways, libraries can alleviate the financial burden on the students they serve. This volume showcases approaches taken by academic libraries to benefit their campus communities, the challenges the authors faced, and the lessons learned. It serves as a valuable source of information and inspiration for those wishing to implement their own initiatives.

CORRELATING WRITER’S BLOCK AND ESL LEARNERS’ WRITING QUALITY

Despite the importance of writing in the language learners’ development, there are difficulties faced by English as a Second Language (ESL) learners that stem from various factors. One of them is the presence of writer’s block that could affect writing quality. Therefore, this study aims to describe writer’s block, along with a statistically-laden analysis of the possible correlation between the blocking experiences of 55 Filipino ESL learners and the levels of easability and readability of the essays they had written. This research employed a descriptive-correlational design using The Questionnaire in Identifying Writer’s Block (QIWB) to gauge the extent of occurrence of writer’s block and the Coh-Metrix Common Core Text Easability and Readability Assessor (hereafter Coh-Metrix T.E.R.A.), an online computational tool, to measure the levels of easability and readability of the essays. The result shows that the learners generally experienced writer’s block, and their essays collectively showed high levels of easability on the basis of narrativity, referential cohesion, and deep cohesion. However, the essays were low in syntactic simplicity and word concreteness, while the level of readability computed exceeded that of the reading ability of 10th-grade learners. Test of correlation revealed that there exists negligible relationship between writer’s block and the overall easability and readability levels of the essays, though a significant but a weak relationship was documented between lateness and word concreteness and with premature editing and deep cohesion, respectively.

Livros, leituras e impressos na escola primária do Rio Grande do Norte (1910-1930)

Este trabalho tem por objetivo evidenciar os livros, leituras e impressos utilizados na Escola Primária do Rio Grande do Norte, entre as décadas de 1910 e 1930. Fundamenta-se na História Cultural, em particular nas práticas e representações, postuladas por Chartier (1990), como também na história da leitura, de Manguel (1996). No que toca à metodologia, realizamos uma pesquisa documental no Arquivo Público do Estado do Rio Grande do Norte-APE/RN e no Instituto Histórico e Geográfico do Rio Grande do Norte/IHGRN. Constituem-se como textos fundantes: cartilhas e materiais didáticos impressos, a exemplo da Cartilha de Ensino Rápido da Leitura, de Mariano de Oliveira (1940), e Leituras Potiguares, de Antônio Fagundes (1933), primeiro livro didático da literatura norte-rio-grandense adotado em diversas instituições escolares. Estes materiais demonstram, por um lado, os suportes de leitura utilizados pelos norte-rio-grandenses, bem como as recomendações da Diretoria Geral de Instrução Pública, posteriormente Diretoria de Educação, sobre os materiais a serem adotados no Rio Grande do Norte. Conclui-se que, no que toca à formação da sociedade letrada, no referido estado os livros, leituras e impressos tiveram contributos para sua difusão a partir das escolas primárias.

“The Rite at Cockrow” in Old Russian Tradition

The article deals with an office found in the Old Russian liturgical tradition under the curious title The Rite at Cockrow or The Cockrow Prayers. The article contains a survey of existing scholarly studies of this office, the first publication of its full text based on a 14th-century codex, State Historical Museum (Moscow), Synodal collection, 325, and an analysis of the structure of this office. The authors come to a conclusion that the basic structure of The Rite at Cockrow consists of some introductory prayer texts, a couple of triadika troparia, and a morning prayer (or two or three morning prayers). This basic structure was intended for a private devotion of a monk in his cell; a variation of this structure is still found in the printed editions of the Horologion under the title “When one wakes up...” The core text of The Rite at Cockrow could be expanded by additional prayers, elements of ecclesiastical offices (of matins, probably also of compline), and a specific combination of psalms and prayers intended for private reading while a monk proceeds from his cell to a church. The authors managed to find the direct prototypes of both the basic structure and the ordinances from The Rite at Cockrow in the Byzantine sources. One of such sources is the Hypotyposis of Nicetas Stethatos, which describes private ascetic daily practices of the Studite monks in Constantinople. The Rite at Cockrow was well accepted by the Old Russian practice, since some specific prayers and hymns from this rite are still used even today, being included into the ordo of “Morning Prayers” according to the late printed editions of Russian Molitvoslov (Prayer-Book) and Kanonnik (Book of [hymnographical] Canons).

Women in Japanese Religions by Barbara Ambros

Reviewed by: Women in Japanese Religions by Barbara Ambros Heather Blair Women in Japanese Religions by Barbara Ambros. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Pp. x + 237. $89.00 cloth, $17.00 paper, e-book available. Women in Japanese Religions provides a chronological survey of women’s participation in Japanese religious culture from the prehistoric Jōmon 縄文 and Yayoi 弥生 periods up through the turn of the twenty-first century. Ambros’s treatment is remarkably balanced: practices and beliefs rooted in local cults, spirit possession, and new religious movements receive consideration equal to that accorded to Buddhism, Shinto, and Confucianism. At the same time, the book’s historical and thematic breadth, combined with its very manageable length (175 pages of text, plus documentation), means that concision reigns supreme. To Ambros’s great credit, brevity does not entail a sacrifice of complexity. For instance, the chapters consistently alert readers to the diversity of women’s religious lives across regions and social statuses (or what we would today call class), era by era. As Ambros herself notes, the book presents a corrective to master narratives of Japanese religious history—and here the gendered quality of “master” matters. Over the years, we have heard a great deal about Buddhist patriarchs and male nativist intellectuals, for example, but much less about laywomen or priestesses. In this respect, it should be noted that Ambros’s primary agenda is informational and documentary rather than analytical or theoretical. This book aims to identify and describe women’s religious activities, not to reconceptualize them in a radical way or to overturn established historiographical paradigms other than androcentrism. Thus, many of the chapters raise predictable topics: Himiko 卑弥呼, Izanami 伊奘諾・伊弉冉・伊邪那美, and Amaterasu 天照, in the chapters on prehistory and ancient myth; the Lotus Sutra in the Heian period; Tenrikyō 天理教 in the Edo and Meiji [End Page 201] periods. This focus on established themes works well, not least because it provides a recognizable counterpoint to other introductory surveys. Significantly, however, there are also points where Ambros conveys information that has not been widely circulated in the English-language literature. For instance, I experienced an aha moment while reading the discussion of the government’s purposeful and systematic exclusion of women from the Shinto priesthood during the Meiji period. I had honestly not known that women had been legally barred from holding the office of shrine priest (p. 126). This kind of attention to significant detail means that Ambros’s work holds interest not only to neophytes but also to those of us who would like to consider ourselves experts. Like her combination of general survey with telling detail, Ambros’s decision to extend the discussion up through the turn of the twenty-first century shapes the tenor of the book in salutary ways. It ensures that we attend to anthropological and sociological as well as historical and archaeological sources. It frustrates, or at the very least complicates, any urge the reader might have to locate authentic religiosity at some point in the past. In highlighting the comparative novelty of practices that have now become conventional (for example, the Shinto wedding ceremony), it also problematizes essentialist views of religion as unchanging “tradition.” Finally, the chapters on the postwar period and millennial “lost decades” clearly track shifts in the ways that Japanese conceptualize and describe their own activities, for example by noting the rise of talk of “spirituality” (supirichuarutei スピリチュアリティ) and “the spiritual world” (seishin sekai 精神世界). In combination with the volume’s historical reliability, balanced approach, and focus on women, the accessibility of Women in Japanese Religions makes the book important, useful, and unique. Students will appreciate Ambros’s straightforward, readable style, and instructors will be happy to have the list of twenty-one discussion questions following the main text. Paired with primary sources and case studies, the book would work well as a core text for a course in Japanese religions. It would also be suitable for courses on gender in Japan or East Asia, or on comparative women’s history. Despite this broad appeal, instructors should be aware that the content sometimes belies the book’s introductory tone. The challenge here is most apparent in what I think of as the “first-use issue...

Intertextual Reading on Tafsir Nur Al-Ihsan: A Study using the Haplology Method

Tafsir Nur al-Ihsan is the second tafsir after Tarjuman al-Mustafid which was written in the Malay language in the 19th century AD by Syeikh Muhammad Sa’id ibn Umar. This study examines the influence of external text sources which exist in the Tafsir Nur Al-Ihsan text. Intertextual reading is used in the process of analyzing Tafsir Nur al-Ihsan based on haplology method. This study employs library research and field study using subjective approach to examine data descriptively and qualitatively. The finding of this study indicates that there are eleven texts which influence the core text of Tafsir Nur al-Ihsan, which are Tafsir al-Jalalyn, Tafsir al-Jamal, Tafsir al-Baydawi, Tafsir al-Khazin, Tafsir al-Baghawi, Tafsir al-Tabari, Tafsir alQurtubi, Tafsir al-Razi, Tafsir al-Nasafi, Tafsir Ibn Kathir and Tafsir al-Tha’labi. The finding of the analysis provides evidence that the text which dominates the text of Tafsir Nur al-Ihsan is Tafsir al-Jamal.

A Review of The Way of the Teacher: A Path for Personal Growth and Professional Fulfillment by Sandra Finney and Jane Thurgood Sagal

A Review of The Way of the Teacher: A Path for Personal Growth and Professional Fulfillment by Sandra Finney and Jane Thurgood Sagal"I enthusiastically commend Finney and Thurgood Sagal for their thoughtful, hopeful, and inspiriting book which ought to be adopted as a core text in all Bachelor of Education programs as well as professional development plans for teachers." Carl Leggo

"Dividing up the [Chinese] Melon, guafen 瓜分": The Fate of a Transcultural Metaphor in the Formation of National Myth

This study sets out to join a discussion which tests a number of assumptions current in the study of conceptual history. These assumptions are: Conceptual history can only be studied within a given language; concepts are articulated in abstract words, and other forms such as metaphors only serve to explain, but have no standing of their own; the sources for conceptual history are core texts with great authority often written by authors of great intellectual consequence; concepts are part of an environment of other concepts, but their reality fit and their institutional connection (promotion, ban) are not part of conceptual history. The test case is the use of the Chinese term melon-division, guafen , for the partition of a state. The study traces the early uses of guafen as a term for “partition;” its stabilization in this function; its negative valuation through association with the partition of Poland, and its systemic use in international law. It then follows the history of the new guafen notion in China since the 1830s as a concept and a historical prospect. None of the narratives of China’s guafen ever gained discursive hegemony, in part because the country’s partition did not materialize. Unwilling to let go of the powerful guafen narrative, however, the reformers, who used the term according to their changing local agendas, adjusted their story: division did not materialize even in 1900 when China’s standing was lowest and foreign troops had occupied the capital. Instead, an invisible partition into zones of influence was taking place. The reformers used new media, including the cartoon, to “translate” the Western image of a Chinese cake being divided into a literal rendering of a melon being cut up, although the image was now badly suited. The poor fit notwithstanding, guafen was also taken up by the early Communists. It eventually became the PRC master narrative of China’s relations with the Powers (Russia, Great Britain, Japan, and the United States), a narrative only occasionally and indirectly challenged by artists such as Zeng Fanzhi. The result is that none of the traditional assumptions about conceptual history can stand the test. The study provides evidence advancing the notion that concepts in the form of words, metaphors, and images cross cultural and language borders through “translation.” The result is the formation of a transcultural and translingual vernacular for words, metaphors, and images that is largely invisible on the surface but retains strong links over time among the connected items.

Mindfulness: A New Paradigm of Psychosocial Care in the Palliative Care Setting in Southeast Asia

Alleviation of suffering in palliative care needs a combination of good symptom control and psychosocial care. The capacity of mindfulness to promote psychological flexibility opens up possibilities of creating a paradigm shift that can potentially change the landscape of psychosocial care. In this review, we attempt to introduce 4 methods to establish mindfulness based on 'The Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness', a core text of Theravada Buddhism, followed by a brief comparison of the concepts and practices of mindfulness in different cultures and religions in Southeast Asia. Next, 2 mindfulness-based interventions specifically designed for palliative psychosocial care - mindfulness-based supportive therapy (MBST) and mini-mindfulness meditation (MMM) are introduced. We hypothesise that mindful practices, tailored to the palliative setting, can promote positive psychosocial outcomes.