Birte Bös and Lucia Kornexl (eds.). Changing genre conventions in historical English news discourse. Advances in historical sociolinguistics 5. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: Benjamins, 2015, xv + 254 pp., € 99.00/$ 149.00.

Mark Twain's famous hoax articles, such as "Petrified Man" (1862) and "ABloody Massacre near Carson" (1863), are forerunners of a genre - news satire -which blends together social criticism, humour and intentional deception.Unlike the present-day fake news press, represented e.g. by the British satiricalmagazine Private Eye or the American spoof newspaper The Onion, mostof these inaugural forms were not based on actual events. Instead, they createdentirely imaginary situations so as to feed the readers' thirst for shockingsensations while satirising their manias. Interestingly, Twain's made-up.

This volume explores the complex relations of texts and their contextualising elements, drawing particularly on the notions of paratext, metadiscourse and framing. It aims at developing a more comprehensive historical understanding of these phenomena, covering a wide time span, from Old English to the 20th century, in a range of historical genres and contexts of text production, mediation and consumption. However, more fundamentally, it also seeks to expand our conception of text and the communicative ‘spaces’ surrounding them, and probe the explanatory potential of the concepts under investigation. Though essentially rooted in historical linguistics and philology, the twelve contributions of this volume are also open to insights from other disciplines (such as medieval manuscript studies and bibliography, but also information studies, marketing studies, and even digital electronics), and thus tackle opportunities and challenges in researching the dynamics of text and framing phenomena in a historical perspective.

Among the most important sources for understanding the cultures and systems of thought of ancient Mesopotamia is a large body of magical and medical texts written in the Sumerian and Akkadian languages. An especially significant branch of this literature centres upon witchcraft. Mesopotamian anti-witchcraft rituals and incantations attribute ill-health and misfortune to the magic machinations of witches and prescribe ceremonies, devices, and treatments for dispelling witchcraft, destroying the witch, and protecting and curing the patient. The Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-Witchcraft Rituals aims to present a reconstruction of this body of texts; it provides critical editions of the relevant rituals and prescriptions based on the study of the cuneiform tablets and fragments recovered from the libraries of ancient Mesopotamia. "Now that we have the second volume, we the more admire the thoughtful organisation of the entire project, the strict methods followed, and the insightful observations and decisions made." - Martin Stol, in: Bibliotheca Orientalis LXXIV n° 3-4 (mei-augustus 2017)

Clinical conformal radiotherapy is the holy grail of radiation treatment and is now becoming a reality through the combined efforts of physical scientists and engineers, who have improved the physical basis of radiotherapy, and the interest and concern of imaginative radiotherapists and radiographers. Intensity-Modulated Radiation Therapy de