Manuscript Discoveries Research Articles

A discussion about the version of the Bible available to Muhammad

It is a mandate that all Muslims believe in all previous revelations given by God along with the Qur’an (Surah 2:4). Relative to discussions with Christians, Muslims are required to believe the Bible. Some Muslim apologists today contend that the Bible has been ‘corrupted’ or tainted through the infusion of faulty doctrines and the exclusion of valuable texts that support Islamic ideas by dubious scribes and malicious copyists. According to them there is no way of knowing what was in the ‘original text’ of the Bible.This article offers both a response to the Muslim apologist arguments regarding biblical integrity and trustworthiness as well as explains that what Muhammad knew as the Bible through the Syriac Peshitta is essentially the same in biblical content as what most reputable Bible versions contain today. Through the efforts of labour intensive manuscript discovery and exhaustive textual criticism, both Christians and Muslims can know with precision what the early writers of both the Old and New Testament wrote as ‘inspired’ Scripture. In order for the Muslim to be consistent in following the mandate to believe all the books previously given by God as well as the Qur’an, he must believe the Syriac Peshitta, or a Bible version that is a comparable translation, in order for the Muslim mandate to make sense. Such a concession, however, places the Muslim in an extremely difficult position that needs to be discussed between Christians and Muslims if they both wish and desire to be thought of as worshiping the one true God.

A return to the evidence for Marguerite Porete’s authorship of the Mirror of Simple Souls

ABSTRACTIn 1946 Romana Guarnieri identified Marguerite Porete as the author of the Mirror of Simple Souls. Since a small number of historians has recently expressed doubts about this identification, a fresh look at the evidence is warranted. This article first returns to Guarnieri’s announcement and subsequent statements on the subject in order to highlight both their strengths and their weaknesses. It then re-assesses the evidence, paying particular attention to new findings that have emerged since 1946. Although Guarnieri’s treatment of the evidence contained flaws, she was all but certainly correct in identifying Marguerite Porete as the author of the Mirror of Simple Souls. New, precise, linguistic analysis and fresh manuscript discoveries strengthen this case.

Tales of Dreaming Men

From the nineteenth century to the present, scholars and writers have perceived strong parallels between the 1001 Nights and early modern European literary works. The 1001 Nights tale of “The Sleeper and the Waker,” has been seen as a source for the frame of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (1595). Other scholars are skeptical of the ease with which such analogues are postulated from the vantage point of Weltliteratur, and frequently point to the missing links in speculative chains of transmission. This article examines a variant tale of “The Sleeper and the Waker,” found in a Tunisian manuscript of A Hundred and One Nights, to show that divergences between Shakespeare’s Christopher Sly and Abu al-Hasan in “The Sleeper and the Waker” reflect distinctive characteristics of the 1001 Nights story collection. Such manuscript discoveries allow scholars to probe the parallels between these tales and the literatures of early modern Europe.

Meister Eckhart’s Self-translations into the Vernacular

The present article presents a new manuscript discovery of an Eckhart manuscript hitherto thought to have been lost. The text section of Eckhartian texts consist to a large extent of questions, two of which are being discussed here. As it seems these texts are not, as previously believed, vernacular translations of Eckhart’s Latin exegetical commentaries, but of Latin questions which Eckhart seems to have collected in his Liber quaestionum and translated into the vernacular. ‘Eckhart’ here is taken as a broad label that may encompass Eckhart himself as well as his early readers.

The Research on Kant’s Philosophy in the Institute of Philosophy at Nicolaus Copernicus University, Torun, Poland

The paper shortly summarizes the research on the philosophy of Kant in the Institute of Philosophy at the Nicolaus Copernicus University (Torun, Poland). About 30 years ago professor Miroslaw Żelazny with a group of collaborators started their research which focuses on three main topics: the reconstruction of Kant’s philosophical system against the background of eighteenth-century German philosophy, historical investigation into its reception in Poland, and the translation of Kant’s works. One of the greatest achievements are the source investigations and the discovery of some unknown manuscripts, the first Polish edition of the “Collected Works of Immanuel Kant” and several monographies on various aspects of Kant’s thought. The paper also stresses the importance of international collaboration with eminent Kant scholars from Germany and Eastern Europe for the projects carried out in Torun.

Loving Literature: A Cultural History

Loving Literature: A Cultural History

Making Connections

PreludeThey gave me a job title: Special Collections Librarian. I curate writers' papers. I see their successes, their chaos and their attempts to produce order as they go through a creative process that can be messy, frustrating and ego-breaking. I have to understand these writers. Sometimes it is hard. But I try because their families have entrusted me, and the organisation I represent, with the responsibility of protecting their heritage and making it accessible. I am the absent and silent friend. So, sometimes I get scared too because of this responsibility.Another one of my roles is that of a conduit for researchers using these papers. So I prepare guides that help them find what they want from these archives. I often wonder whether researchers are finding what they want, and I am always thinking, How can I do this better?Overall, there is pleasure. I do not think they suspect how much pleasure I derive from this job. Pleasure in new archival discoveries made; pleasure in reading new writings based on the resources in the archives; pleasure in meeting the writers and their families. Pleasure in seeing joy on the faces of researchers.Literary archives at the UWI, St AugustineLiterary archives, also referred to as papers and collections, have traditionally been used to probe the works of writers. Within recent times, the cultural studies approach used in the study of literature has made literary archives more prominent as these resources are used to unveil the circumstances impacting on authors' lives, writing, artistic production, and reception, as well as post-publication afterlives of their works.The nature of such archives varies and may consist of any combination of the following: manuscripts; reviews; correspondence; diaries; ephemera surrounding the research and publication of the works; photographs; art; multimedia; and electronic files from personal computers. The archives of Caribbean writers held at the University of the West Indies (UWI), St Augustine campus repository in the Alma Jordan Library are of a similar character, with a cross-section of these material types. The collections hold the papers of authors who have contributed significantly to the development of literature in the Anglophone Caribbean; and collectively, these materials provide primary resources on the evolution of Caribbean literature and cultural thought. Among the holdings at the St Augustine campus library are the collections of celebrated Caribbean writers including Derek Walcott, Sam Selvon, C.L.R. James, Monique Roffey, Eric Roach, and materials from individuals who broadcast on the BBC radio series Caribbean Voices, 1945-58. While academia benefits from new discoveries of unpublished manuscripts, correspondence, diaries and so on, there are also insights to be derived in unearthing connections among writers and anecdotes about their lives which can further contribute to scholarship. Having these resources housed in a single repository has made the interrelationship that existed among these writers even more apparent to the curator's eye.Using the St Augustine West Indiana and Special Collections as my primary source, and focusing on the collections of Derek Walcott and C.L.R. James in particular, in this essay I demonstrate how these two archives reveal a wider web of correspondence and interconnections between other literary figures in the repository.Literary encountersThe relationship among Caribbean writers emerges clearly in the correspondence they shared. The Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James communicated with a wide cross-section of influential persons in Caribbean literature. James was a political activist and Marxist intellectual whose ideas continue to be debated and to generate scholarship. He was also an avid reader and prolific writer, and as such he accumulated materials in several locations, leading to an amassment of his papers in at least two repositories, at UWI St Augustine and Columbia University, New York. …

True Stories and the Poetics of Textual Discovery

As we know from the Nag Hammadi saga, there is something enchanting about telling find stories. This enchantment is part of the very reason “getting the story straight” is so difficult when it comes to manuscript discoveries: every story worth its salt will be transformed in the telling, and stories that are alive are reactive. If one way to approach these stories is to debunk those aspects that are products of embellishment and myth, another is to attend precisely to their affective power, seeing them as a narrative genre in the longue durée. Using examples from both pre-modern find stories and narratives about the discovery of the Cairo Geniza and the Dead Sea Scrolls, this essay discusses what the find story genre can tell us about how we imagine our relationship with a fragmented past. True or legendary, such stories are always imaginative products. Attending to this dimension can reveal a poetics of textual discovery that is ancient and widely shared--a vital link between modern scholarship, public interest, and ancient myth.

The Nag Hammadi Story by James M. Robinson

Reviewed by: The Nag Hammadi Story by James M. Robinson Harold W. Attridge James M. Robinson The Nag Hammadi Story, 2 Volumes Boston: Brill, 2014 Pp. xxxiv + 1,216 pp. $499.00. For students of early Christianity, the most important manuscript discovery of the twentieth century was undoubtedly the Nag Hammadi collection of Coptic texts. That collection of the remains of twelve codices and portions of a thirteenth provided new primary documentation for the phenomenon of Gnosticism in its manifold variety, as well as new Hermetic literature and texts that do not fit neatly into any classification of ancient religious literature. These two volumes, by a scholar who played a significant role in the story, describe not the content of the ancient leather bound papyri, but the process by which they were discovered and eventually published. They provide a wealth of documentary material and testimonials from most of the scholars who were involved in the process. One of the factors that leads to the heft of these two volumes is that all of this material is presented in both an English translation and, in footnotes, in the original [End Page 618] languages. Most of this material was collected over the years while Robinson served as secretary of the UNESCO committee that eventually produced the facsimile edition of the find. Robinson’s narrative situates the documents and provides useful cross references and comments that make clear his own take on the process that he archives. A final chapter (2:1101–48) focuses on the excavations at the site of Nag Hammadi and the Basilica of St. Pachomius from 1975–1978. The initial episode in this whole account (1:1–40) is in many ways the most colorful and most intriguing as a historical problem. Jean Doresse, the earliest European scholar to be involved with the find, visited the area of the discovery in 1947. Robinson’s own version of the discovery, developed in critical dialogue with Doresse’s account, has long been a part of Nag Hammadi lore (The Biblical Archaeologist 42 [1979]) but has been critically re-examined in recent years (Goodacre, JSNT 35 [2013]; Lewis and Blount, JBL 133 [2014]). Much of the recent controversy has focused on the precise location of the discovery. After a visit to the area in 1950, Doresse identified the general area of the discovery as a site near the village of Ḥamrah Dūm, at the base of the cliffs known as the Jabal al-Ṭārif. Doresse took a series of photos of the site from slightly different angles and published them in different versions of his account (Les livres secrets des gnostiques d’Égypte, 1958; The Discovery of the Nag Hammadi Texts, 1960). His descriptions of the area also note features such as cavities on the face of the cliff that served as tombs and burials scattered around the base of the cliff. Robinson (1:9–11) notes the difficulties with Doresse’s description. There is not much evidence of burials on the lower areas, while there are tombs from the Sixth Dynasty midway up the talus. Locating the site of discovery more precisely has been hindered not only by some vagueness in Doresse’s account, but also by different versions of the site of the discovery (Robinson, 1:28). All the venues are in the same general vicinity but in slightly different circumstances. Robinson interviewed the man who discovered the codices, Muḥammad ‘Alī, in 1975, and travelled with him to the area. ‘Alī initially identified the location of the find as the tomb of Thauti but then later identified the site that Robinson believes to be correct, underneath a broken boulder on the talus. This identification was corroborated by the testimony of another local. The archaeological investigation, however, did not find confirmatory evidence, nor was Robinson able to confirm ‘Alī’s claim to have found remains of a corpse near the jar containing the codices. Robinson’s efforts to find the historical facts of the discovery are admirable. They include the publication of hitherto unknown and very important early reports of the find, yet they also serve as a lesson to anyone interested in “wie es eigentligh gewesen” about how...

Die neuen Psalmenhomilien: Eine kritische Edition des Codex Monacensis Graecus 314 ed. by Lorenzo Perrone

Reviewed by: Die neuen Psalmenhomilien: Eine kritische Edition des Codex Monacensis Graecus 314 ed. by Lorenzo Perrone Peter W. Martens Lorenzo Perrone, ed., with Marina Molin Pradel, Emanuela Prinzivalli and Antonio Cacciari Die neuen Psalmenhomilien: Eine kritische Edition des Codex Monacensis Graecus 314 Die Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten Jahrhunderte, Neue Folge 19 (Origenes Werke XIII) Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015 Pp. IX + 641. $196.00. In the spring of 2012, Marina Molin Pradel made a remarkable discovery in the Staatsbibliothek in Munich. Pradel was tasked with producing a new catalog of some of its Greek manuscripts—a long undertaking, in which a team of scholars will ultimately replace the catalog produced over two hundred years ago by Ignatio Hardt (a digitized version of this older catalog is available on the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek website). When Pradel’s research took her to Codex [End Page 628] Graecus 314, a twelfth-century manuscript that contains 29 anonymous Greek homilies on the Psalms, her attention was piqued by the fact that this collection included the text of four of the five Origenian homilies on Psalm 36 that Rufinus had translated into Latin (and which we still possess today). Moreover, she noticed that the other homilies transmitted by Codex Graecus 314 corresponded to a large extent to the catalog of Origen’s sermons on the Psalms that Jerome listed in his Epistula 33. With the help of a team of scholars, Lorenzo Perrone set himself the task of editing this manuscript. The critical edition here under review, the editio princeps of Codex Graecus 314, was published less than three years after the discovery of these homilies. Joseph Trigg is preparing an English translation for the Fathers of the Church series. The edition is prefaced with four introductory chapters. The first by Perrone briefly describes the circumstances under which Codex Graecus 314 was discovered and identifies a series of external and internal criteria that point to Origenian authorship and what we can learn about Origen from these new homilies. There are some interesting discoveries. For instance, Origen admits that he has become more circumspect about his “flight to the tropological meaning” of passages, now holding himself more closely to the wording of passages (Hom. 76 in Ps. III.2); he acknowledges a bishop who has heard him preach and praised his words (Hom. 67 in Ps. I.1); there is also a reference to his youth in Alexandria, where he remarks about the lack of qualified ecclesiastical teachers and the schools of “heretics” who flourished there (Hom. 77 in Ps. II.4). The next chapter by Pradel offers an abbreviated catalog entry of Codex Graecus 314, describing its contents, physical description, scribal characteristics, provenance, and binding. Next, Emanuela Prinzivalli analyzes Rufinus’s method of translation, which can now be fruitfully compared against his Greek original. (The appendix of this edition prints in parallel columns Rufinus’s four Latin homilies that now have a corresponding Greek text.) In the final section of the introduction Perrone lays out the principles of the current edition. A few points are worth drawing to the reader’s attention: text is printed in bold where it coincides with material attributed to Origen in the catenae on the Psalms (the apparatus identifies the editions or manuscripts from which these catenae fragments are drawn); the apparatus also identifies passages in other Origenian works that parallel what we find in these homilies; finally, the apparatus signals some of Origen’s sources, mainly Philo, and a few later authors who drew inspiration from his work on the Psalms, chiefly Eusebius, Didymus, and Jerome. The volume closes with black-and-white images of three folios, and a number of indices of passages: scriptural, Origenian, and those from other ancient authors. It is hard to overstate the importance of this manuscript discovery. For a discovery of similar magnitude for the study of Greek early Christianity we are required to look back over seventy years to the Tura papyrus find, where a number of Origen and Didymus’s previously lost works were uncovered. Prior to the discovery of the 29 homilies in Munich, all that survived of Origen’s enormous work on the Psalms were Rufinus’s translation of...

Discovering, Identifying and Editing Early Modern Manuscripts. Ed. by PETER BEAL. (English Manuscript Studies, 1100-1700, 18.)

Theeleven essays gathered by Peter Beal for this most recent volume of English Manuscript Studies are published together in memory and celebration of Harold Love (1937–2007), twenty years on from the first publication of his inspirational and influential monograph, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (1993). It is hard not to imagine that Love would have been modestly and humorously delighted both by the range and the excellence of the essays, which bring new manuscript discoveries in poetry, prose and drama to light both from very well and very little known repositories. At the start of his essay, John Burrows reports something of Love's intellectual generosity and curiosity—‘“So much the more interesting”, he said, when he told me that he knew nothing of the matter’ (p. 181); and this essay, one of two collaborative essays at the end of the volume that propose new, technologically-assisted ways of thinking about authorship in manuscript, and about the relationships between widely dispersed texts in manuscript, extend that interest for readers today. That one might see the structure of the current volume as a response in kind to the structure of Love's edition of The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1999), which married brilliantly attuned literary and archival scholarship with John Burrows' appendix, ‘A Computational Approach to the Rochester Canon’, is a lovely testament to the elegance of the tribute paid by the volume's editor and contributors.

Unearthed Documents and the Question of the Oral versus Written Nature of the Classic of Poetry

Prominent Western scholars have proposed that the Shijing was produced in a largely oral context and that writing played little role in the creation and subsequent transmission of the poems. Recent discoveries of several manuscripts of and about these poems call into question this view. I examine these recently published manuscripts as well as other types of paleographic evidence to show that writing played a crucial role in each of the three phases of the Classic of Poetry’s early history: its redaction during the Han dynasty, its transmission over the course of the Eastern Zhou period, and the original creation of at least some of the poems during the Western Zhou dynasty. I do not claim that oral influences played no role in the creation, transmission, and redaction of the text, but I do suggest that these influences have been overemphasized in recent Western scholarship. 摘要: 西方學者多論證《詩經》產生於口述文化環境中，以為在《詩》的創作和傳授過程中書寫沒有起多少作用。然而，最近出土的幾份《詩經》和與《詩經》有關的早期寫本對這種說法提出重大的質疑。本文根據些寫本以及其他出土文字資料論證書寫對《詩經》早期歷史的每一階段都起重要作用。

Les dualismes dans les manuscrits de Qumrân

Very early after the discovery of the first manuscripts of Qumran in Cave 1, the scholars were agree to describe the Essene world‑view as dualistic. The close study of each document reveals today a more complicated literary situation. The manuscripts of Qumran attest to three kinds of dualism : cosmic dualism, relative dualism, and human dualism. This taxonomy is not to take too strictly because the dualisms can be combined inside a text to reinforce and justify the Essene world‑view, especially the sectarian perspective. The combination is also a proof of the multiple state of dualism in Ancient Judaism. Moreover, we note the relationship between dualism and apocalypticism. The apocalyptical literature may be a source of diffusion of different types of dualism.

"Made Up from Many Experimentall Notions": The Society of Apothecaries, Medical Humanism, and the Rhetoric of Experience in 1630s London†.

This article examines an important new manuscript discovery: a set of lectures delivered at the Society of Apothecaries in 1634 by four members of the Society. No evidence of the intellectual and methodological assumptions of the apothecaries in this period has previously been known; the article contextualizes the lectures, and identifies the authors-a prominent group of apothecaries centered on the controversial John Buggs and the botanist Thomas Johnson. It then proceeds to discuss the contents of the lectures, which consist, to a remarkable extent, of reflections on the nature of physic and pharmacy inspired by the works of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medical humanists. The apothecaries used the resources of medical humanism to raise the status of pharmacy as a medical discipline, and to argue for the proficiency of the apothecary as a fully fledged physician. Moreover, they emphasized the role of operative arts and used the rhetoric of "experiment" and "experience" in ways that might seem, on first impression, to foreshadow the "new science" that would soon emerge in England. As such, the lectures allow us to make not only some major revisions to existing accounts of the apothecary-physician relationship and the intellectual assumptions behind it, but also to some prominent recent literature in the social history of science and the history of the concept of "experimental philosophy."

Textual Fluidity and Rewriting in Parallel Traditions

This article addresses some key aspects of the relation between textual fluidity and rewriting in the Second temple period on the basis of the comparison between the David traditions in Samuel and in Chronicles. While the discovery of Sam manuscripts in Cave 4 of Khirbet Qumran (especially 4QSama) has made likely that Chr used a source distinct from Sam MT, recent debates about the character of 4QSama and literary revisions in Sam MT and LXX suggest that the fluidity of the David traditions at the time of Chr’s composition may in fact have been even more significant than previously assumed. Building on this, the article compares the rewriting of these David traditions in Sam and Chr; in particular, it argues that although the scope of such rewriting is usually much more significant in Chr, there are several passages where Chr preserves an account of David which is less expansionist than Sam MT, and sometimes even than any other ancient version of Sam, as already observed by S. L. McKenzie and others. The implications of this finding for the characterization of Chr as rewritten composition are explored in the last part of the article. Chr’s relation to Sam emerges as a paradigmatic – albeit by no means unique – example of the complex dynamics that unite a rewritten composition to its source; this finding questions any simple, straightforward relation between the development of rewritten compositions and the textual stabilization of the source(s) on which these compositions are based. Furthermore, while it is possible to understand what features, precisely, would have led the ancient audience of Chr to see that work as a new composition, rather than as a variant edition of its source, it is dubious that such features may be used to define a literary genre proper.

Textual Fluidity and Rewriting in Parallel Traditions

This article addresses some key aspects of the relation between textual fluidity and rewriting in the Second temple period on the basis of the comparison between the David traditions in Samuel and in Chronicles. While the discovery of Sam manuscripts in Cave 4 of Khirbet Qumran (especially 4QSama) has made likely that Chr used a source distinct from Sam MT, recent debates about the character of 4QSama and literary revisions in Sam MT and LXX suggest that the fluidity of the David traditions at the time of Chr’s composition may in fact have been even more significant than previously assumed. Building on this, the article compares the rewriting of these David traditions in Sam and Chr; in particular, it argues that although the scope of such rewriting is usually much more significant in Chr, there are several passages where Chr preserves an account of David which is less expansionist than Sam MT, and sometimes even than any other ancient version of Sam, as already observed by S. L. McKenzie and others. The implications of this finding for the characterization of Chr as rewritten composition are explored in the last part of the article. Chr’s relation to Sam emerges as a paradigmatic – albeit by no means unique – example of the complex dynamics that unite a rewritten composition to its source; this finding questions any simple, straightforward relation between the development of rewritten compositions and the textual stabilization of the source(s) on which these compositions are based. Furthermore, while it is possible to understand what features, precisely, would have led the ancient audience of Chr to see that work as a new composition, rather than as a variant edition of its source, it is dubious that such features may be used to define a literary genre proper.

Developing a Premodern Manuscript Application Profile Using Dublin Core

Librarians and catalogers, particularly at small repositories, often do not have the training or access to experts to fully describe a medieval manuscript for cataloging, much less digital access. But some descriptions must be available to attract researchers to work with the materials, which are often considered institutional treasures. Approaching manuscripts can be daunting for metadata specialists and catalogers. The Dublin Core Premodern Manuscripts Application Profile (PMAP), currently under development, is designed to be an educational and simple tool for medievalists with little knowledge of metadata and librarians with little knowledge of manuscript studies to facilitate discovery of manuscripts in little-known collections.

Targum Pseudo-Jonathan and Late Jewish Literary Aramaic

The twentieth-century’s Targum manuscript discoveries made clear that if Neofiti, the Fragment Targums, and the Cairo Geniza fragments were composed in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, then Targum Pseudo-Jonathan was not. In this classic essay, originally written in Hebrew in 1985–1986 and translated here for the first time, Stephen Kaufman worked to describe Pseudo-Jonathan’s dialect. He found that it borrowed from other dialects, but merged them into a single unified dialect appearing not only in Pseudo-Jonathan, but also in several Writings Targums. This essay thus presented the earliest description of Late Jewish Literary Aramaic.

Reading Early Modern Women's Writing (review)

Reviewed by: Reading Early Modern Women's Writing Marea Mitchell Salzman, Paul, Reading Early Modern Women's Writing, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006; hardback; pp. 256; 1 b/w illustration; R.R.P. £71.00; ISBN 9780199261048. Inspired by 'the recent interest in the history of reading' (p. 219), Paul Salzman's book uses a case study approach to re-examine the field of Early Modern women's writing, taking both well-known and less familiar examples. Its seven chapters, plus introduction and conclusion explore 'early modern women's writing as a body of knowledge' (p. 1), arguing that the energy and excitement that has surrounded the discovery of manuscripts and writing by women has had as a corollary a lack of reflection about the nature of that work as it is being used by modern scholars. The category of gender, which has allowed and enabled the study of women's writing, has also entailed a homogenization of that writing where differences are overlooked, and sameness is instantiated in the process of identifying, preserving and disseminating the work of a group of people that has been undervalued historically. Salzman's project is to rethink the way that women's writing is studied and the contexts in which it might be used. This is a thoughtful reflection from a scholar whose own endeavours in the field of bringing women's writing to light has been pioneering. [End Page 246] Salzman builds on the work of feminist historians and critics like Margaret Ezell and Danielle Clark in inclusive and generous ways, acknowledging the work and debates that have preceded his own discussion. While he canvasses material that is now becoming quite familiar, even canonical, to scholars in the field, such as that of Mary Wroth, Mary Sidney and Anne Clifford, he brings to readers the work of other writers such as Eleanor Davies, Margaret Fell and Anna Trapnel. The endeavours of women outside what might be thought of as a literary field, unprotected by a more privileged background, need to be understood, and to become part of a history of Early Modern writing more generally. Now that we have such an extensive corpus of material, as academics and scholars we can make new connections between writings and new distinctions within the category of women's writing. We can move away from the need to reify that writing, and let it stand in its own contexts. A large part of the point of the book is that seeing women as part of a group unified by gender has entailed a '[f]lattening out … [of] political context' (p. 116), so the question that begins the book, taken from Denise Riley's work, is 'Am I that name?' In other words, is women's writing containable in the category that describes it? This is a timely approach, and one that has been broached before, perhaps in less sympathetic ways, in other fields. Allen J. Frantzen's article 'When women aren't enough' in Speculum 1993, discussing the field of medieval women's writing, comes to mind. The discussion of the history of the work on women's writing is also insightful, assessing, for example, Virginia Woolf's readings of Anne Clifford, and Vita Sackville West's treatment of Aphra Behn. Woolf's desire in A Room of One's Own for women to read back through is part of the story here. As Salzman points out in the concluding pages of the book, critics tend to find in the objects of their study what suits the critical mood of the moment. If poststructuralism has taught us that this is inevitable, and even preferable when weighed against the notion of a timeless and objective criticism, it nevertheless does not hurt to be aware of these critical moods. If the trend in Behn criticism is moving away from sexuality to politics, this acknowledges that in terms of temporary mores the kinds of critics interested in women's writing tend to value radicalism over conventionalism and there is more to be said in one area than another – in Salzman's formulation, there is a preference for sinners over saints (p. 218). While this book does present serious and...

The Text Form of the OT Citations in Hebrews Chapter 1 and the Implications for the Study of the Septuagint

This paper offers a detailed investigation of the LXX texts underlying the seven OT citations in Hebrews chapter 1, taking account of significant twentieth-century manuscript discoveries and recent developments in the field of Septuagintal Studies. The findings are then related to the study of the use of the OT in the NT more generally, and to some important current issues in the study of the LXX, such as the value of Lucianic readings. This investigation supports the growing consensus that the author of Hebrews reproduced his scriptural citations faithfully, so that the burden of proof should now rest with those who arguefora deliberate alteration of his source.