Poetry Research Articles

Crouching Woman

Crouching Woman Joan Larkin (bio) Camille Claudel, 1884 A double knot of flesh:nakedness as armor. Her taut arm grips her shoulder,shields her face. Ugly, beautiful––forget such words! A woman posing in a cold atelierplants her feet in stone dust,folds into herself, elbow pressed to knee, breasts drooping with gravity,thighs straining. Wills herselfto become stone. From a distance: a bouldertrembles on a rim of air . . . [End Page 64] Joan Larkin joan larkin has published five poetry collections, including Blue Hanuman and My Body: New and Selected Poems. She cotranslated Sor Juana’s Love Poems and coedited four anthologies, including Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time. She has been a lifelong teacher. Her honors include the Lambda, nea, and Shelley Memorial awards. Copyright © 2023 Joan Larkin ...

Frederick Douglas Kelly Jr. (1934–2022)

Frederick Douglas Kelly Jr. (1934–2022) Wendy Pfeffer Douglas Kelly, the University of Wisconsin's Julian Harris Professor of Medieval French Emeritus, died on the morning of March 21, 2022 at the age of 87. In an email, Keith Busby described his late colleague as "one of the great medieval scholars of his generation." Kelly's research was devoted particularly to the topics of rhetoric and romance narrative of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Underlying all of his work is the notion that vernacular poetics were grounded in the Latin arts of poetry. Busby's encomium continued, "He was a great scholar and teacher and the best of men." Douglas received his BA, Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Southern California (1956), his MA (1959) and Ph.D. (1962) from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Once in Madison, he never left—he taught French, Italian, medieval Occitan, and Medieval Studies there for forty-three years, leaving teaching as professor emeritus. In an email, Julia Nephew, a former student, called Douglas "an inspiring and empathetic mentor." In a different email, Suzanne Hagedorn spoke of Douglas's "unfailingly gracious presence, his insightful comments on conference papers, his erudition and kindness." Among his many honors, we can list: Fellow of the Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin; Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America; and senior fellow for the Netherland Institute for Advanced Study. Douglas was a recipient of two significant University of Wisconsin recognitions: the Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award and the Hilldale Award for the Humanities. The French branch of the Société internationale arthurienne awarded him its Prix Excalibur in 1995. Over the course of his career, Douglas received extramural grant funding from Phi Beta Kappa, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. I knew him as a welcoming, warm, and humble individual, open to ideas from all sides, ever inquisitive. My last interaction with Douglas was in 2019, at Kalamazoo, where he regretted simply [End Page 277] that he was perhaps getting too old to participate as actively in the congress as he would have liked. Though Douglas was better known as an Old French scholar, Occitan literature did not escape his purview. He was a long-standing member of the Société Guilhem IX. He discussed Flamenca in his important book Medieval Imagination; considered Flamenca and Jaufre in "Exaggeration, Abrupt Conversion, and the Uses of Description"; included Raimon Vidal de Besalù in The Arts of Poetry and Prose; and examined fourteenth-century lyric poets At de Mons and Raimon de Cornet in "The Late Medieval Art of Poetry" and again in "Translatio Poetriae." He was also the man responsible for Occitan as an area editor for Oxford Bibliographies in Medieval Studies. It is a sad day when a great scholar and a genuinely warm human being leaves our company. He will be missed. Wendy Pfeffer University of Louisville University of Pennsylvania OCCITAN-RELATED WORKS CITED Kelly, Douglas. The Arts of Poetry and Prose. Typologie des sources du Moyen Âge occidental 59. Turnhout: Brepols, 1991. Google Scholar ———. "Exaggeration, Abrupt Conversion, and the Uses of Description in Jaufre and Flamenca." In Studia occitanica in memoriam Paul Remy. Edited by Hans-Erich Keller et al. 2 vols. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1987. 2: 107–119. Google Scholar ———. "The Late Medieval Art of Poetry: The Evidence from At de Mons and Raimon de Cornet." In Études de langue et de littérature médiévales offertes à Peter T. Ricketts. Edited by Dominique Billy and Ann Buckley. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. 681–692. Google Scholar ———. Medieval Imagination: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Courtly Love. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978. Google Scholar ———. "Translatio Poetriae: Occitan Apprenticeship from the Latin Classroom to the Vernacular Court." In Le Poetriae del medioevo latino: Modelli, fortuna, commenti. Edited by Gian Carlo Alessio and Domenico Losappio. Filologie medievali e moderne 15. Venice: Edizioni Ca' Foscari, 2018. 91–128. Google Scholar Copyright © 2023 Société Guilhem IX ...

INTERŽANROVSKA PROHODNOST VARIJANATA USMENE LIRSKE PESME: NA PRIMERU PESAMA „PRANjE BEZ VODE I BEZ SAPUNAˮ I „NAJBOLjE MJESTO ZA SELOˮ

The paper examines the process of de-ritualisation of variants of two lyric oral poems, which were not classified as ritual in Serbian oral poetry collections of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić. The aim of the paper is to show how the poems changed from ritual to love and erotic ones, and to identify their intergenre characteristics. The analysis has shown that although the two variants differ according to the presence of love and erotic motifs, they have certain common features of genre restructuring. On the basis of the fertility cult, manifested in traditional spring and summer rites, variants of poems would lose their ritual context and become susceptible to introducing love motifs and changing traditional poetic images whose meanings would be interpreted in the new context. Dif- ferent layers of variants, no matter how old they were, become complementary through aestheticization. Therefore, in both poems, there is no discordance in the middle verses as would be expected in the initial phase of de-ritualisation, which is the indication of an advanced stage of the transition of variants into the genre of love poetry.

The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Arthurian Literature, ed. by Kathy Cawsey and Elizabeth Edwards. Peterborough, Ont.: broadview press, 2024, 506 pp., 1 b/w fig., 10 color plates.

Undoubtedly, the genres of Arthurian romances and verse narratives continue to appeal deeply to the current generation, and we can be certain that focusing on those texts in our seminars will help tremendously to attract enough students. Of course, heroic poetry, courtly love poetry, the fabliaux or mæren also prove to be of timeless value. Kathy Cawsey and Elizabeth Edwards here present a hefty anthology of Arthurian texts in modern English translation, hence for English-speaking students. I can well imagine that this book could become very useful for a course at the university level, with no other text editions/translations necessary.

5 Questions for Cleyvis Natera

5 Questions for Cleyvis Natera Michelle Johnson (bio) In Neruda on the Park, Cleyvis Natera's debut novel, a young lawyer seeks a new path after being fired from a top law firm while her mother schemes to stop a development project in their predominantly Dominican neighborhood in New York City and her father makes plans for the couple to return to the Dominican Republic. Q: A book of Neruda poems reappears throughout the story. Why Neruda? A: Pablo Neruda is a beloved and polarizing figure in literature. I have always been fascinated by his work and the strength of his position as a cultural phenomenon. He wrote some of the most beautiful poems I've ever read, and the strength of his art is reflected in its resonance to this day, forty-nine years after his death. Neruda believed that art—especially poetry and literature—should be accessible to all members of society, regardless of class or education level. He was known for standing up for the rights of marginalized people against unjust governments. Yet he admitted to sexually assaulting a woman—a fact that is often dismissed or conveniently forgotten when we celebrate his achievements as an artist outside his country of birth. In Chile, there has been resistance whenever there is a movement to erect structures in his honor. My debut novel, Neruda on the Park, introduces readers to Nothar Park, a fictional neighborhood in northern Manhattan comprised predominantly of a Dominican immigrant community on the cusp of great change. The gentrification that has altered neighborhoods all around New York City has somehow missed this community. The plot revolves around how my two main characters—mother-daughter duo Eusebia and Luz—react once the gentrification of the neighborhood arrives. While Luz, a young upwardly mobile lawyer, sees the coming change as inevitable, her mother, Eusebia, sees it as an opportunity to resist. In Neruda on the Park, there are several characters who deeply love Neruda's work. Luz's parents, Eusebia and Vladimir, credit the love poems of Neruda with salvaging their struggling marriage by enabling them to articulate emotions they were unable to say aloud to each other. Likewise, Neruda's work features prominently in a budding love affair between Luz and Hudson, the developer of the luxury condominium her mother so vehemently opposes. When Luz has an opportunity to help Hudson name the new structure he is building, she naturally proposes Neruda on the Park since the poet was responsible for saving her parents' marriage and enabling her family to make the fictional neighborhood of Nothar Park home. But there is also something more nuanced at play with the use of Neruda's poetry throughout the novel—Neruda on the Park, as a construction, is the looming threat against safety for vulnerable members of this community—most notably the women who take center stage in this narrative. Central themes in my novel include womanhood and trauma, so I thought Neruda would serve as a solid departure point to allow for conversations about how we, as a society, deal with toxic figures who have contributed stunning and important works of art. Q: This novel, with its multiple conflicts, is a page-turner. Gentrification is one central conflict. What other literature concerning gentrification would you recommend? A: Halsey Street, by Naima Coster, is the brilliant story of Penelope Grand, a young woman who is forced to return home to Brooklyn to look after her ailing father. A struggling artist who has been unable to find firm ground, Penelope's fraught relationship with her mother mirrors the devastation she must confront in her altered, gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood. There is a blindness, a refusal to confront the truth, that at times seems to shroud the way everyone functions in Coster's fictional world, and it is within that space—where transformation is tied to a need to come to terms with the world and people as they truly are—that readers are granted a path to meditate on our own everyday fictions. Halsey Street is a virtuosic novel everyone should read to better understand themselves. Survival Math, by Mitchell S. Jackson, is a spellbinding, powerful, and complex essay collection...

Abroad Among Our Kind: Sylvia Townsend Warner's Spanish Civil War Love Poems

Abroad Among Our Kind: Sylvia Townsend Warner's Spanish Civil War Love Poems

Cykl poetycki do Hyelli ze zbioru Lusus Andrea Navagera – wstęp, przekład, komentarz

A poetic cycle on Hyella from Andrea Navagero’s Lusus: introduction, translation, commentary : The paper presents the first Polish translation of a mini-series of six short poems about Hyella by Andrea Navagero (1483–1529). The selected works are part of Navagero’s famous Latin poetry collection entitled Lusus. The translation is supplemented by an introduction and commentary notes. The Latin text reproduced in the paper is based on the edition of Lusus by Claudio Griggio (2001). The introduction presents the author’s biography and includes a brief description of the whole collection. Navagero was a diplomat, a poet and the official historian of the Republic of Venice. Collected by friends in Orationes duae carminaque nonnulla, his poems were edited posthumously in Venice in 1530. The most important part of Lusus are bucolic epigrams, a new form of Neo-Latin pastoral developed by Navagero. This minor lyric form called “pastoral play” (lusus pastoralis) gained recognition quickly and was widely imitated in 16th century. The collection also includes other literary genres – bucolic poems, elegies, and erotic poems. However, the most famous is the series of epigrams whose heroine or addressee is Hyella, a girl impossible to identify. The introduction presents a discussion about the sources and the interpretation of the love poems about Hyella (poems 21, 22, 28, 31, 32 and 37). The most important literary tradition from which Navagero draws inspiration is the Greek and Latin ancient epigram. For poem 21, the source is the Anacreontea 19, while poem 22 uses the motifs of the lamp and the night as the guardians of lovers, both popular in The Greek Anthology. For two other pieces, the direct source is the poetry of Catullus: poem 31 uses Catullus’s carmen 5, while poem 32 combines motifs from Catullus’s carmina 82, 92 and 109. In addition, in poem 28 we find similarities with Ausonius’s epigram 9. Other important sources for Navagero were the poetry of Petrarch and the neo-Catullan poets, mostly Giovanni Pontano, Michele Marullo, and Cristoforo Landino.

Приключения души: трансляция системы мистической поэзии в языке Вениамина Блаженного

The poetry of Veniamin Blazhenny (the Blessed) can be seen as a vivid example of the translation of the typological properties of the language of mysticism in late 20th century poetry. The artistic nature of the work of the Blessed during this time did not receive a fundamental analysis. The soul, a key concept of Blazhenny’s poetry, reveals undoubted similarities with the conceptualization of the soul and the idea of metempsychosis in Jewish and Judeo-­Christian mysticism. This study focuses on grammatical elements, and in particular the system of pronouns and negative poetics, the way the subject is constructed and the strategy of anti-discursiveness. The key word and concept of Blazhenny’s poetry is the Soul which reveals an undoubted similarity with the conceptualization of the soul and the idea of metempsychosis in Jewish and Jewish-­Christian mysticism.

Narrative Semiotics and Passions Semiotics in the Poem of Djamil Buthaina"The Beloved Adversary [In Arabic

The platonic love poetry was considered as one of the most important kinds of lyrics or the lyric poetry; it spread widely in the Umayad’s castles Although some scholars differ wether this kind of poetry was belonging to this very era or to earlier periods, the history of literature had been biased toward making it belongs to the Umayad era. The latter was proved after the appearance of many poets who wrote fascinating poems about the pure love, the suffering, the pain and the longing of the poet to his sole beloved, like what is found in the poetry of Djamil Ibn Maamar. Those love poems contained their stories, heroes, themes and their own objects of value, some are with and others are against. So, the narrative semiotics is chosen with its both sides related to the narrative constituent to study the sample “the poem of DjamilButhaina”, trying to apply the emotional sample of the semiotics of passion in order to reveal the stages of emotion formation and its own evolution or development. All the previous within the framework to study the emotion because the latter is considered as an effective motivator of the action.

Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity

Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity

Perfect Love in Yeats’s Later Love Poems

Perfect Love in Yeats’s Later Love Poems

A Cognitive Approach to A Dead Rose by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The mind of the human being is a highly complex organ that is still under investigation and exploration. A lot has been discovered about its normal functions. Sciences that study matters related to the mind are highly related to concepts, logic, and cognitive linguistics. The goal of cognitive linguistics is to explain how the mind works in matters related to language. Cognitive stylistics is an important branch of cognitive linguistics that takes into consideration the cognitive processes by which readers react to particular aspects of texts. This research aims to analyze the selected poem A Dead Rose by Elizabeth Barrett Browning using a cognitive stylistic approach. The aim is to analyze the poem stylistically using a cognitive approach to reach a better and more comprehensive understanding of the poem. The purpose is to grasp the theme of the poem cognitively. The reason for selecting this particular poem is that it is considered one of the mostfor selecting this particular poem because it is considered one of themost-read pieces of English literature through the ages and it is rich data for such analysis. One of the conclusions arrived at is that the use and repetition of phrases and clauses add to Browning’s writing style, highlighting the brilliant use of language and how she can transfer us as readers to the landmark of the poem. Through this we are able to know that the poem is a love poem where the lover is either the rose or the speaker

Semantic Parallelism in Love Poetry in the Umayyad Era, Analytical Study - Selected Models

This study, was named with (Semantic Parallelism in love Poetry in the Umayyad Era, Analytical Study - Selected Models-) tries to investigate semantic parallelism as one of the stylistic features in love poetry in the Umayyad era, where it sheds light through this technique on some of the technical aspects inherent in the content of the lyrical text and exploring its depths, drawing on the opinions of some Western critics, ancient Arab scholars and contemporary Arab researchers.
 The study examined the nature of semantic parallelism and its importance in literary and critical studies, and then went through the application of the topic of semantic parallelism to selected models of love poetry in the Umayyad era for a number of stallion poets, through two main aspects: synonymous parallelism and contralateral or congruent parallelism, in order to reveal The effectiveness of parallelism in supplementing the poetry with a number of artistic and moral characteristics and stimulating the recipient, in addition to creating a kind of moral and verbal cohesion in the creative poetic text.
 The study also dealt with semantic parallelism through all types of love Poetry in that period, and in some cases it drew illustrative charts for the purpose of clarifying the idea and ease of acceptance by the recipient.

The Women Poet: Exploring the Existence of Women and Feminist Values from the Song of Songs 3:1-5

Aren't humans created equally? in every situation, they are equal whatever the situation. Humans are social creatures who always depend on groups and cannot live alone to the fullest. Biologically, humans are classified based on sex in two forms, namely male (male) and female (female). Both men and women, humans still have the same awareness to express their existence in society. However, the awareness to accept existence (existence) is based on several conditions. The Bible is a place to describe the existence of women in society in terms of religion (Christianity). Women have always been objects and do not have the same existence as men, which was once based on public awareness (which was very patriarchal). One of the love poems, the Song of Solomon, records the existence of women and describes it clearly that women had a unique existence in society at the time of the writing of the Bible even before Jesus. This paper aims to explain the existence of women in Kidung Agung using a feminist literary criticism approach as a writer. The author would like to emphasize that the poem “Dream of the Bride” in Song of Solomon 3:1-5 was written by a woman. In the end, this paper will provide moral values ​​for women today.

The Sufi Poems of Love: Al Busiri’s Burdah through The Lens of Rumi

The Sufi Poems of Love: Al Busiri’s Burdah through The Lens of Rumi

The Evaluation of Aşık Mustafa Kurbanoğlu’s Love Poems in the Light of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory

Kavramsal metafor teorisi, bilişsel anlam bilimine dayanan ve metaforu kavramsal düzeyde ele alan teorinin adıdır. George Lakoff ve Mark Johnson tarafından 1980 yılında yayımlanan Metaphors We Live By adlı eserle alanyazında ifadesini bulan bu teori, son yıllarda Türkiye’de hem tarihî ve çağdaş lehçelere hem de bu lehçelere ait önemli eserlere uygulanmaktadır. Bu makalede ise Kars âşıklık geleneğinin 21. yüzyıldaki önemli isimlerinden biri olan Âşık Mustafa Kurbanoğlu’nun tarafımızca derlenen aşk şiirleri ele alınmış ve bu şiirlerde tespit edilen aşk metaforları kavramsal metafor teorisi ışığında incelenmiştir. Âşık Mustafa Kurbanoğlu ile yapılan birebir görüşmeler, gözlemler ve elektronik ortamdaki araştırmalar sonucunda 193 şiir elde edilmiş, bu şiirlerin 27’sinin aşk konulu yazılmış şiirler olduğu tespit edilmiştir. Şairin aşk konulu şiirleri üzerinde metafor tespiti yapılırken Pragglejaz Group tarafından geliştirilen MIP (Metaphor Identification Procedure) adlı yöntemden yararlanılmıştır. Bu çalışma neticesinde kavramsal metafor teorisinin halk şiiri verimleri üzerinde uygulanmasının mümkün olduğu görülmüş, ayrıca Âşık Mustafa Kurbanoğlu’nun şiirlerindeki aşk algısının çok yönlülüğü ve şairin aşk anlayışının zenginliği ortaya konulmuştur.

ANALISIS KAJIAN STILISTIKA DAN MAKNA PADA PUISI “MATA HITAM” KARYA W.S. RENDRA

Literary works are expressions that convey ideas and ideas conveyed by an author. Literary works in the form of poetry discuss a lot about life such as feelings, education, economics, social, politics and culture. This study aims to determine the meaning of the poem Mata Hitam by W.S. Rendra. This study uses a stylistic approach based on the theory of Wallek & Warren, 1995: 229 and Munir, S, & Mulyono, 2013: 2. This study uses qualitative methods and content analysis. The source of data in this study is the poem Mata Hitam by W.S. Rendra. The result of this research is to know the stylistic and meaning contained in the poem through sentence structure, figure of speech, imagery, pattern, and rhyme. Every love poem by W.S. Rendra has different meanings of love and always ends happily.

The Bold News of Birdcalls by Edward Morin

Reviewed by: The Bold News of Birdcalls by Edward Morin Meg Kearney (bio) the bold news of birdcalls Edward Morin Kelsay Books https://kelsaybooks.com/products/the-bold-news-of-birdcalls 102 pages; Print, $18.50 "It might almost be said that the birds are all birds of the poets and of no one else, because it is only the poetical temperament that fully responds to them," said John Burroughs in the opening line of his Birds and Poets (1877). As proof, the world abounds with poems about and inspired by birds. Although Edward Morin's new book often strays from that feathered subject, The Bold News of Birdcalls is filled with a variety of songs as well as the "news" of stories. The collection is divided into four sections of fairly equal size, each with a varied tone suggested by its title: "Noise of Blue Jays," "Melody of Wrens," "Endurance of Robins," and "Passage of Swans." With boisterous, troublesome jays ("sinister as Dutch elm disease") as its [End Page 136] backdrop, part 1 explores themes of life and death through its free-verse elegies for fellow poet-teacher friends, a poem titled "Icicles" ("Stilettos of ice, / as many as stabbed Caesar"), as well as a gripping narrative detailing the speaker as victim of an armed robbery that nearly saw him killed. A tribute to those "black-winged acrobats," "Bank Swallows" almost reads like a love poem as the speaker recalls finding the swallows' nest: "Remember, love, our barefooted climb / in dry roots thin as hair, up the sliding, / steep sand hill?" But it ends on an ominous note as the birds "flutter and scold above us / … throwing shadows the size of hawks." In "Depression," a jack-o'-lantern sits "ravaged" in the post-Halloween season just as we humans are ravaged by the passing of years; its "limp mouth / twists crookedly as during a stroke." And the last poem in the section, "Yes," tells the story of Joe Sartori, a neighbor of the speaker's parents whom the speaker visits when home from college. Sartori, wheelchair-bound and nearly completely paralyzed, is capable of saying only one word: "Yes." This sort of one-note song proves to be an inspiration to the speaker, when he is old enough to appreciate the affirmation embodied in the word. Part 2 kicks off with a sort of ode in tercets to the "plain-brown-wrappered wren" who appears in April seeking summer "housing." While the goldfinches "emulate forsythias' hue," the plain wren is a "friend of gardeners" with a surprisingly strong song: Voice vibrations pulsate from chin through tall throatand halfway down the chest. Such breath control!What long, loud peals for such a little bell. This is a section of nostalgia, with the speaker recalling memories of a childhood spent in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. We take a ride on the "Milk Train"; we meet Brad, a high school classmate who died young; we hear the clang of metal on glass as carpenter's nails are poured into a jar; we join in the rallying cry to rid the Midwest's wetlands of the invader-phragmites choking out the cattails and pushing out the wildlife; we listen to a fish story of "The Big One" that got away; and wince when a man falls from a ladder as well as when the baseball coach calls a twelve-year-old second baseman an "idiot," only to remember—much to his embarrassment and horror—that the boy is "slow witted." The speaker is haunted by his mistake, recalling being labeled a [End Page 137] "moron" by schoolmates as a youth; and "Now that I'd acted really dumb, the mantra / 'You idiot!' choked deep in my throat." Morin's is a warm and empathetic voice, buoyed and inspired by birds. His very soul is lifted by seeing them and hearing their calls—"as when indigo buntings fly through sunlight, / magically changing from black to bright blue" and when from the canopy of deep woods ringsone distant thrush's haunting descant …This recluse trills its two voice boxeslike Pan's double flute. The poems in part 2 are often written in...

From the Heights of the Atlas: A Panorama of Traditional Poetry in Tamazight

AbstractTraditional oral poetry in Takbaylit, Tachelhit, Central Moroccan Tamazight, and Tarafit dialects has been the subject of numerous studies ranging from ethnographic to linguistic. Rather than duplicate what is already widely available, the following brings together comments on a number of representative poems from across the Maghreb to give the reader an idea of the variety of types, styles, and themes of Tamazight poetic tradition. The selections, which are translated into English here for the first time, range from the moving devotional poem in Tachelhit “Like the Beads of a Rosary” to the beautiful love poem in Takbaylit “To Whom Should I Complain.” Among the poets whose works are included are Mririda n'Ait Attik (Tachelhit), Al Hadj Ammar ou al Hadj (Takbaylit), and Taougrat Oult Aissa (Central Moroccan Tamazigt).

Polymaths of Islam: Power and Networks of Knowledge in Central Asia By James Pickett

James Pickett’s much-anticipated book derives from his 2015 Princeton Ph.D. dissertation, and the comparatively slim end product only hints at the wealth of research that lies beneath and beyond. Pickett’s work on the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Bukharan ulema’s education, world-view, career networks, institutions and relationship with the state, is the product of truly exhaustive digging through the incompletely-catalogued manuscript collections of the al-Biruni Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent, and those of the obstructively-managed National Archives of Uzbekistan, as well as other collections in India, Russia, the United Kingdom and Tajikistan. He cites no fewer than sixty unpublished manuscripts in Persian and Arabic, including thirteen Jung, or working notebooks used by these ‘Polymaths of Islam’, which can contain texts on a bewildering range of topics, ‘Sufi litanies, occult diagrams, love poems, legal excerpts and medical remedies, all jotted within the margins of a single volume’ (p. 245). Their very eclecticism is both proof and expression of the many different roles both the ulema as a social group and individual scholars could play. The same man might write a juridical opinion condemning the consumption of alcohol and poetry celebrating wine, and while this created tension it was no more than most of them were prepared to live with. Pickett makes a compelling case for not separating the Sufi who renounced power to live as a dervish and the qāḍī who took on a powerful state office and the rewards that came with it—both roles might be played by the same person at different stages in their lives. He gives that simple and ubiquitous but often uninformative label—the ulema—a new depth, resonance and interest that those writing on other parts of the Islamic world would do well to note and imitate. He also ensures that the caricatured view of a ‘traditional’ Islamic education as something narrow, blinkered and dogmatic which we gain from the memoirs of Muslim reformists—Sadriddin Aini’s probably being the best-known example—can no longer stand.