Written in the twelfth century, the Naisadhiyacarita (The Adventures of Nala, King of Nisadha) is a seminal Sanskrit poem beloved by South Asian literary communities for nearly a millennium. This volume introduces readers to the poem’s author, his reading communities, the modes through which the poem has been read and used, the contexts through which it became canonical, its literary offspring, and the emotional power it still holds for the culture that values it. The study privileges the intellectual, affective, and social forms of cultural practice informing a region’s people and institutions. It treats literary texts as traditions in their own right and draws attention to the critical genres and actors involved in their reception.

New insights into Pietro d’Abano’s unique approach to translations The commentary of Pietro d’Abano on Bartholomew’s Latin translation of Pseudo-Aristotle's Problemata Physica, published in 1310, constitutes an important historical source for the investigation of the complex relationship between text, translation, and commentary in a non-curricular part of the corpusAristotelicum. As the eight articles in this volume show, the study of Pietro’s commentary not only provides valuable insights into the manner in which a commentator deals with the problems of a translated text, but will also bring to light the idiosyncrasy of Pietro’s approach in comparison to his contemporaries and successors, the particularities of his commentary in light of the habitual exegetical practices applied in the teaching of regular curricular texts, as well as the influence of philosophical traditions outside the strict framework of the medieval arts faculty. Contributors Joan Cadden (University of California, Davis), Gijs Coucke (KU Leuven), Béatrice Delaurenti (École des Hautes Études et Sciences Sociales – Paris), Pieter De Leemans (KU Leuven), Françoise Guichard-Tesson (KU Leuven), Danielle Jacquart (École Pratique des Hautes Études – Paris), Christian Meyer (Centre d’Études supérieures de la Renaissance – Tours), Iolanda Ventura (CNRS – Université d’Orléans)

The story of Cain and Abel narrates the primeval events associated with the beginnings of the world and humanity. But the presence of linguistic and grammatical ambiguities coupled with narrative gaps provided translators and interpreters with a number of points of departure for expanding the story. The result is a number of well established and interpretive traditions shared between Jewish and Christian literature. This book focuses on how the interpretive traditions derived from Genesis 4 exerted significant influence on Jewish and Christian authors who knew rewritten versions of the story. The goal is to help readers appreciate these traditions within the broader interpretive context rather than within the narrow confines of the canon.

This volume brings together papers relating to the pronunciation of Semitic languages and the representation of their pronunciation in written form. The papers focus on sources representative of a period that stretches from late antiquity until the Middle Ages. A large proportion of them concern reading traditions of Biblical Hebrew, especially the vocalisation notation systems used to represent them. Also discussed are orthography and the written representation of prosody. Beyond Biblical Hebrew, there are studies concerning Punic, Biblical Aramaic, Syriac, and Arabic, as well as post-biblical traditions of Hebrew such as piyyuṭ and medieval Hebrew poetry. There were many parallels and interactions between these various language traditions and the volume demonstrates that important insights can be gained from such a wide range of perspectives across different historical periods.

"Presents evidence that the themes of the Book of Mormon represent the religious and cultural issues that were prevalent during the Protestant Reformation, not from Joseph Smith's time and place, and that virtually all the language of the original text of the book dates from the 1530s through the 1730s"--Provided by publisher.